INPRESS BOOKS
JANUARY - JUNE 2017 BOOKS FOR INDEPENDENT THINKERS
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DEAR READER, Welcome to the Inpress January - June 2017 catalogue. Every season we discuss how we think this is our best catalogue ever both in terms of content and production, and I have to agree, this one is really good! In these pages we present award winners, debuts, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, fantasy, crime and everything in-between. Having introduced eleven new publishers in the second half of last year, and two more, Les Fugitives and Patrician Press, in January of this year, we are delighted to be presenting an even more eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging selection of titles, authors and publishers in this season's catalogue. We guarantee there will be something in here for every taste. As you know, Inpress exists to promote independent publishers and their growth and we would be nowhere without the backing of you, the booksellers. I would like to take this letter as an opportunity to say a huge thank you on behalf of everyone associated with Inpress for your continued support, sales of our books and interest in our publishers and their authors. Everyone we work with produces books as beautiful, inspiring and challenging as their bigger commercial publishing counterparts. What we lack in resource we make up for in resourcefulness. You will find Inpress publishers some of the most charming, professional, engaged, forward thinking people in the business, as a group publishing a massive array of books, but with one thing in common, passion. Passion for everything they do, every book they publish and every sale they achieve. If you would like any further information on any of the books included in the catalogue, would like to contact any of our publishers or their authors please don't hesitate to be in touch, either with your Inpress rep or to us at head office. We really do welcome your comments and feedback. Two other big bits of news: Distributor move, all the books and magazines we sell are now distributed by NBN International. Everything in this catalogue is available to order from there and all ordering details can be found on the inside back cover. In June last year Inpress took over the running of The Poetry Book Society, we are committed to growing this business and using it as a way to promote poetry in the UK and beyond. We realise many of you booksellers out there may not have the time you would like to curate your poetry bookshelves as well as you might like.The PBS quarterly Bulletin selects the best books published in that season, as picked by established poets themselves. We are happy to share that information with booksellers and are working on a way to make this a valuable resource for you, your poetry sections and the growing poetry audience out there. I hope you enjoy browsing these pages, please do get back to us with any positive feedback or constructive criticism. Your local rep will be round with an order form, or if you would like to receive one direct, please email us at enquiries@inpressbooks.co.uk or download a copy from www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Yours, Sophie O’Neill | Managing Director sophie@inpressbooks.co.uk
CAIN BY LUKE KENNARD
NOW OUT IN PAPERBACK WINNER, BRITISH BOOK DESIGN & PRODUCTION AWARDS 2016 GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS OF 2016 GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS FOR SUMMER 2016 "Luke Kennard is an excruciating observer of the southern cringe. Cain is his best book yet, and OBSERVER BEST HOLIDAY READS 2016 POETRY SCHOOL BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 ought to bring him coach-loads of new readers. " JEREMY NOEL-TOD, THE SUNDAY TIMES
The year is 2016 and Luke Kennard finds himself estranged from his family, his publisher and his faith. With the help of his Community Psychiatric Nurse, who claims to be the living embodiment of Cain – the first murderer – the poet changes his name to Father K and searches for answers – in his childhood, in poetry, in alcohol, and in a notorious, long-running DVD box-set. Tricksy, acerbic and laugh-out-loud funny, Cain is a dazzling collection from Next Generation Poet Luke Kennard. In a series of animated conversations, Cain provides therapy sessions for the author, covering everything from interfaith dialogue and genealogy to zombies. Cain‘s central sequence of 31 anagram poems re-energises Genesis 4:9-12, demonstrating the mastery of form and trademark surreal humour that has made Kennard one of British poetry’s brightest lights.
"Playful and excoriating … Kennard is a master of the unexpected." LEAF ARBUTHNOT, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT "I was dazzled by Luke Kennard’s Cain – its central sequence of 31 prose-poems, each an anagram of the same few verses of Genesis, is the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year." ALAN HOLLINGHURST, THE GUARDIAN BEST BOOKS OF 2016 "Tortuous and very funny." EDWINA ATLEE, POETRY REVIEW "Kennard has always been a writer with deconstructive, avant-garde tendencies, and these dazzling performances take us further into the treacherous materiality of language than ever before." DAI GEORGE, POETRY LONDON "Kennard dramatically repurposes the skill he exemplifies better than any poet writing today; he makes deconstruction into a profoundly creative act." PHIL BROWN, HUFFINGTON POST
PENNED IN THE MARGINS 1ST FEBRUARY 2017 9781908058478 £9.99
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CONTEMPORARY FINE EDITIONS
Little Island Press is an independent publisher of new and classic poetry, fiction and international literature in translation. Based in the UK, it is the work of a few dedicated individuals who believe that great literature survives in great books: each one a little island of its own.
“Little Island Press is an exciting new publisher. Their books and booklets are beautiful.” Michael Schmidt, PN Review NEW PRICE LIST FOR 2016 BOOKS Adah Kaleh by Freddie Mason 9780993505607 - £12.99 Merrill Moore, XxX: 100 Poems 9780993505614 - £14.99 Sadakichi Hartmann, Collected Poems 9780993505621 - £16.99 William Plomer, Selected Poems 9780993505638 - £14.99 Bink Noll, The House & Other Poems 9780993505652 - £14.99 Lola Ridge, Collected Early Poems 1905-1927 9780993505645 - £16.99
FIND 2017 TITLES ON PG. 35, 56 & 61.
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INPRESS NEWS
LITTLE ISLAND PRESS
VALLEY PRESS
SOME BOOKS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED...
LUCKY DIP Catharine Boddy Within this mixed-up selection of children's poetry you'll find such terrors as a dragon under the bed, dinner ladies (yikes!) and a cereal-loving dinosaur. You might glimpse a fox, if you open that page quickly enough, and you'll find helpful poems to read out loud if you ever lose your passport, or haven't quite got round to brushing your teeth yet...
£4.99 | 9781908853790
ALL THE FOOTPRINTS I LEFT WERE RED Rowena Knight
GUESTS OF TIME Various Authors
Rowena Knight grew up in New Zealand and emigrated to England on her thirteenth birthday. Her poems explore the heightened sense of alienation that being “foreign” brings to adolescence; whether coming to terms with an England that is a far cry from the Enid Blyton books you were raised on, or trying to survive school with the wrong words – and rucksack.
A full-colour, limited edition hardback commemorating three poets' residency at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Inspired by their time delving into the museum’s drawers and cabinets, the poets’ new work viewed the collections with fresh eyes. Their poems are presented here alongside 19th-century poetry from writers linked with the early days of the museum.
£5.99 | 9781908853752
£24.99 | 9781908853806
RAW MATERIAL Sue Wilsea
Raw Material is a new collection of short stories from one of Hull’s foremost twenty-first century writers. Some of the characters in these tales are writers too – others are murderers, some are both. One is Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Some may not be human; but that would be telling. "Do not expect gentle bedtime stories from Sue Wilsea’s latest collection. Rather, expect to grip your seat in anticipation … of wonderful words that grip and explode and then tug earnestly at your inner self." Val Wood
£9.99 | 9781908853783 VP50: FIFTY POEMS FROM VALLEY PRESS Jamie McGarry (ed.) From humble, 'student hobby' beginnings in 2008, Valley Press has grown into a force to be reckoned with in UK poetry. Famed for its distinctive, no-two-the-same cover designs, plus writing that is frequently accessible and ambitious, the press is now home to some of the UK's most exciting poetic talents. This new anthology offers a valuable overview of VP's poetry output so far. Here are fifty poems, one from each poetry title, selected by readers of the much-loved weekly newsletter; then ordered and organised by founding editor Jamie McGarry. In these pages, comedy sits alongside tragedy, the surreal finds itself alongside piercingly-accurate life writing, and the only thing you can expect is the unexpected.
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£10.99 | 9781908853509
NEW FROM JONATHAN GREEN THE WICKED WIZARD OF OZ Jonathan Green The Wicked Wizard of Oz is a brand new nightmarish gamebook - a multi-path book, very much in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, in which you choose the course of the story - inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, and the Dieselpunk aesthetic movement. Anybody who has read and played Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland will have a very clear idea of what to expect!
SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390312 PB | 198 X 129MM | 320PP | 1 MAY 2017
BY THE SAME AUTHOR... ALICE'S NIGHTMARE IN WONDERLAND Several years after the events of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself back in Wonderland and called upon to save the world of playing cards and talking animals from the increasingly deranged Queen of Hearts. But all is not as it first appears in the fluctuating dream world and soon Alice is battling to save herself from the nightmare that is rapidly overtaking the realm. Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Alice hadn’t drunk from the bottle labelled ‘Drink Me’, or if she hadn’t joined the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse for tea? Well now you can find out. In Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland, YOU decide which route Alice should take, which perils to risk, and which of Wonderland’s strange denizens to fight.
YOU ARE THE HERO
£9.99 | 9781909679597
Fighting Fantasy gamebooks have sold over 17 million books worldwide, in over 30 languages. But when Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone sat down to write The Warlock of Firetop Mountain they had no idea this one book would go on to spawn another eighty or more titles, and have an immeasurable impact on a generation of children growing up in the 1980s. Part history, part celebration, You Are The Hero chronicles more than three decades of Fighting Fantasy. Written by Jonathan Green (author of seven Fighting Fantasy titles), this mighty tome will appeal to anyone who ever wiled away a washed-out summer holiday with only two dice, a pencil, and an eraser for company.
£25.00 | 9781909679368
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INPRESS NEWS
THE WICKED WIZARD OF OZ
JOHN BERGER THE ONLY COLLECTED VOLUME OF HIS POETRY Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic – John Berger was one of the major European intellectuals of our time. For sixty years he challenged the way we see the world and how we think about it, in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag and From A to X. Although Berger always wrote poetry, often smuggling poems inside books like The Seventh Man, The White Bird and Pages of the Wound, this was the first time his poetry has been collected in English. Collected Poems reflects Berger’s longstanding concerns with art and politics, love and war, history and memory, emigration, immigration and the life of the European peasantry. It includes well-known poems like ‘The Ladle’, ‘Village Maternity’ and ‘Death of La Nan M.’ as well over twenty previously unpublished poems. From ‘My Coney’ (written in 1952 when Berger was just twenty-six) to ‘They Are the Last’ written in 2008, Berger the poet demonstrates an enduring commitment to the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. These are perfectly framed still-life images, sensual and plain, delicate sketches of hard lives caught between the provisional quality of language and the permanence of things. John Berger’s Collected Poems reveals its author to be a major poet of our time.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS 1ST SEPTEMBER 2014 9780992740955 £8.95
"Although at ninety, death can never be unexpected, John always seemed to be such a Peter Pan-like figure; it is very hard to accept that we have now lost his playful and radical intelligence. He was, of course, a fascinating critic, a wonderful novelist and the most original of poets. But he was also a man of courteous and patient generosity. No matter how busy or important he was, John never made you feel as though you were intruding on his time or his reputation. This is a rare gift. Over the years John was also a very good friend to Smokestack, writing generous back-cover blurbs for several Smokestack poets. And then John did Smokestack the great honour, a few years ago, of publishing his Collected Poems with Smokestack. By way of return, Smokestack was proud to have been able to publish The Long White Thread of Words to celebrate John’s ninetieth birthday last year. The world will be a dispiriting place without John’s warm kindness and his bright comradeship." Andy Croft, Smokestack Books
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WINNER OF THE MICHAEL MARKS AWARD FOR BEST PAMPHLET PUBLISHER Congratulations to The Emma Press, who won the Michael Marks Awards for Best Poetry Pamphlet Publisher in December, with the judges commenting: "The Emma Press has grown steadily in the few years since they were first shortlisted. As well as having a remarkable list of poets they pay close attention to every aspect of the pamphlets they publish. This is a vibrant, thoughtful press bringing a great energy and sense of endeavour to their work.” Here are three of our favourite pamhplets they've published so far... MALKIN Camille Ralphs Malkin is a vivid evocation of the trials of the Pendle Witches in 1612. The sequence of poems is delivered in the form of epitaphic monologues, with the accused men and women eerily addressing the reader with their confessions and pleas. Strikingly, Camille Ralphs has employed unorthodox spelling throughout the monologues, bringing out new meanings in familiar words and encouraging the reader to immerse themselves in the world of the poems. Fully illustrated with woodcut-style drawings from Emma Wright.
£5.00 | 9781910139301 TRUE TALES OF THE COUNTRYSIDE Deborah Alma Deborah Alma’s poems are gloriously pungent, teeming with colours, textures and smells. In True Tales of the Countryside, her debut pamphlet, Alma writes vividly about sex, love and ageing in rural Shropshire and Wales, and reflects on her experiences as a mixed-race, British-Asian woman. Eyeballs pop, fresh piss steams and women come – loudly – in poems which often startle with their honesty and intimacy.
£6.50 | 9781910139264 GOOSE FAIR NIGHT Kathy Pimlott Goose Fair Night is a generous, jellied feast of a book, full of sharp-eyed yet tender details about friendship, family and familiarity. Pimlott ranges around the country and through the centuries to offer her warmly incisive take on living and loving in a gorgeous, unstable world. The poems plunge us into the Midlands, bustling central London, seaside scenes, questionable pots of jam, and the captivating worldview of Pimlott’s grandmother Enid. This is a book to make your mouth water and your heart swell.
£6.50 | 9781910139356
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INPRESS NEWS
THE EMMA PRESS
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT Marie Heaney (ed.) All Through the Night is a collection of moving and evocative night poems for all stages of life. Lullabies and other poems relating to children and parenting form the opening section, while later poems celebrate or give voice to our various night-time pleasures and preoccupations. The elegiac poems towards the end of the book turn to face the prospect of that last long sleep that awaits us all. Marie Heaney’s wide-ranging selection includes poems by WH Auden, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, WB Yeats and many more. From tiny tots who battle against bedtime, to grown-ups who yearn for the shelter of untroubled sleep, All Through the Night is the perfect bedside book for all stages of life.
POETRY
POETRY IRELAND | £12.99 | 9781902121611 HB | 216 X 148MM | 160PP | 15 SEPTEMBER 2016
POEMS FOR PENSIONERS Andy Seed Fifty funny, nostalgic and poignant rhymes, for those of fifty-plus who like a chuckle. Here is a book that celebrates the joys, the aches, the lapses, the frustrations and the creaks of the retirement years. With fifty funny, nostalgic and poignant rhymes about childhood memories, hair loss, modern technology, manners, packaging, cats, grandchildren and more it’s the perfect read for those of fifty-plus who like a chuckle.
POETRY
VALLEY PRESS | £7.99 | 9781908853721 PB | 198 X 129MM | 80PP | 8 SEPTEMBER 2016
WAR POEMS Robert Graves (Charles Mundye ed.) Robert Graves: War Poems is a significant publishing event, the first book that draws together all of Robert Graves’s poems about the Great War and, even more significantly, brings into print for the first time the unpublished 1918 manuscript, The Patchwork Flag. War Poems consists of Graves’s first two major published volumes: Over the Brazier (1916) and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917). Graves completed The Patchwork Flag but never published, for many years it has lain in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library and now appears, excitingly, almost a century after composition, an unexpected addition to the canon of First World War poetry.
POETRY
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SEREN | £19.99 | 9781781723296 HB | 216 X 138 MM | 260PP | 23 NOVEMBER 2016
Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize 2016. "The poems in Sunshine, written after two and a half years in psychiatric hospitals, out-Plath Sylvia – they are harrowing, raw and so charged with pain that at the end of each poem, literary comment seems beside the point." Kate Kellaway, The Guardian Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.
POETRY
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058386 PB | 215 X 135MM | 88PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016
PANTY Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay "An unnerving, ominous and beautiful meditation on the loneliness of modern life." Claire Khoda Hazelton, The Guardian A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own. Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature’, Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.
FICTION
TILTED AXIS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911284000 PB | 198 X 128MM | 128PP | 6 JUNE 2016
TURNING BLUE Benjamin Myers "Depraved and decadent... the writing is so damned good." Val McDermid, The Guardian In the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl is missing. The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to work for the local newspaper. For him the case offers the chance of redemption. Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him. As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.
FICTION
MAYFLY PRESS | £7.99 | 9781911356004 PB | 198 X 129 MM | 336PP | 1 AUGUST 2016
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2016 BESTSELLERS
SUNSHINE Melissa Lee-Houghton
JANUARY
THE TOLL Luke Wright “One of the funniest and most brilliant poets of his generation.” The Independent “The best young performance poet around.” The Observer “Visceral, poignant and riotously funny.” The Scotsman The new collection from one of Britain’s most popular poets, The Toll is a tightly-wrought book on politics, family and a crumbling society that sees Luke Wright at the peak of his powers. An escaped lion roams the streets of Essex; a lonely pensioner holds a tower block fête; and the silent majority takes to the streets. This, and much more, in the hotly anticipated second book of poetry by Luke Wright. This is a fine collection that combines Luke’s satirical flair with a darker, more elegaic tone. Look out for especially tender poems about being a dad.
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058423 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80PP | 23 JANUARY 2017
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A first full poetry collection from this Bishop Auckland writer, Corner Shop Cowgirl is a highly unusual mix of verse which manages to see the declining industrial communities of Teesside often through the lens of the USA’s famous Wild West. The first poem 'Reach for the Sky' runs as follows: Blood stone canyon Red sand Reflecting hot the sun The sliver of snake skin in the dust, Survival. Even the charity shops have shut.
POETRY
IRON PRESS | £7.00 | 9780995457911 PB | 210 X 148MM | 48PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
CONNECTOMICS Alison Calder Connectomics is a book of poems that will expand your mind. It does exactly what the title says: it makes connections – between languages, between cultures and between human beings and our brains, making it possible for us to be, to know, and to make connections. As Professor Raymond Tallis says in his foreword, “The wonderfully articulated, poised, often epigrammatic poems, picking up glints from the cutting edge of neuroscience, are so beguiling. The author asks us to look at our brains (and implicitly ourselves) and our lives, our forgotten and remembered tasks through the lens of bioscience refracted in turn through the mind of the poet. They are playful, witty, wry and often poignant.”
POETRY
IRON PRESS | £7.00 | 9780993124594 PB | 210 X 148MM | 48PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
SURREALIST, LOVER, RESISTANT: SELECTED POEMS OF ROBERT DESNOS Timothy Adès (ed.) This extensive and wide-ranging selection is taken from three collections of the poetry of one of France’s most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos. Hailed as the ‘prophet’ of the Surrealist movement by André Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work is completely underrepresented in the English language, with only his children’s poems currently available in English translation. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.
POETRY
ARC PUBLICATIONS | £15.99 | 9781906570699 PB | 216 X 138MM | 520PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
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JANUARY
CORNER SHOP COWGIRL Alison Carr
CRUCIBLE Steven Savile & Steve Lockley 1996, London. The Troubles are in full flow. A young Irish officer, Ronan Frost, is deep undercover inside an IRA cell in London. Something big is happening. Something devastating. Something that will shake the foundations of Anglo-Irish relations and make sure the peace process stalls. The Ogmios Team doesn’t exist. Sir Charles is not confined to a wheelchair. This is where it all begins. With a betrayal.
FICTION
SNOWBOOKS | £6.99 | 9781911390121 PB | 198 X 129MM | 290PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
DANCING ON TOP OF A BROOMSTICK Thomas Lyden “These are the poems of a lover, and a liver. They rock with a Dylanesque profusion of images, and at their finest are reminiscent of the delicate, surreal poems of Lorca. With their weapons and witches they reach for the stars. Tom Lyden was a troubadour and a seeker, after poetry and after truth. His was the road less taken and these are the songs of that journey.” Mary O’Malley
POETRY
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669570 PB | 211 X 135MM | 56PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
THE ART OF DYING Adam Wyeth "From mountain pass to storm-tossed seashore, from Barcelona to the Drakensberg, these new poems by Adam Wyeth feature journeys both witty and surreal. There is much that is busy transforming here, from kitchen to ice-rink; rock to hatching egg. In the richly imagined Talking Tree Alphabet, a birch tree becomes Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt, while the blackthorn is a ‘ravaged whore’. At the heart of the collection, the still point around which the energies flow, is a boy’s relationship with his father, the absurd indignity of death, and the ceaseless unfolding of the generations: ‘An ancient vellum/ where the next life is written’. Language, the raw material of the poet who shapes and makes sense of the world, is celebrated without forgetting the humble source of it all, Yeats’s foul rag and bone shop, or ‘thorns/that draw blood and score the heart completely’ (from ‘Gorse’). Dancing on the edge of civilization, preferring the energizing potential of dream and myth, Wyeth’s is a refreshing new voice on the Irish poetry scene." Katie Donovan
POETRY
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SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669594 PB | 211 X 135MM | 70PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
'Nearly every poem records an important human fact that has hitherto gone unspoken; nearly every poem both marks a past silence and opens a new possibility. This is a truly profound book, a remarkable and valuable achievement.’ Thus Victor Luftig of Yale University greeted Mary Dorcey’s Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. From 1982, her poetry announced itself as revolutionary in subject matter and tone. It was and is groundbreaking. It shattered the silence of centuries in Ireland on the suppressed reality of women’s lives and most remarkably on romantic / erotic love between women. Since then her poetry has travelled around the world and has been taught and researched from the USA to Finland, from Italy to Australia. Many of these poems have become classics, taught in both the Irish and British school curricula. Sensual, elegant, passionate, tender, challenging, politically engaged, Dorcey’s poetry reaches out to us in a voice that is both intimate and challenging.
POETRY
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669532 PB | 211 X 135MM | 164PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
ILLUMINATE Kerrie O'Brien Exploring the concept of oneness and the transcendent nature of art, these raw and powerful reflections on lineage, faith and love will speak to your heart. This is a work of astonishing beauty which truly illuminates modern existence. “Every poem in this collection has the grace of its occasion, speaks with an earned confidence, rehearses and proposes insights of quiet, lingering power. With economy, with precision, with inspired and exact gratitude for being alive, O’ Brien draws from each poem here a crafted epiphany – of love and memory, of art and its occasions, of light and colour and time and being human.” Theo Dorgan
POETRY
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669471 PB | 211 X 138MM | 56PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
FISH ON A BICYCLE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS Jean O'Brien Jean O’Brien’s New & Selected is a revisiting of her four collections starting with The Shadow Keeper in 1997 and moving up to the present day. Her new poems mark a maturing of her work dealing with ill health, parenthood, nature and everything in between. As with her previous collections, her work is honest and direct and calls for a similar response from the reader. As ever she broaches hard subjects without fear or compromise and faces her own mortality. These poems are dealt with in a light-hearted way that belies their seriousness, they are lively and always readable.
POETRY
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669587 PB | 211 X 138MM | 130PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
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JANUARY
TO AIR THE SOUL, THROW ALL THE WINDOWS WIDE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS Mary Dorcey
HOOPS OF HOLINESS Maurice Harmon Maurice Harmon’s sixth collection moves from the sunlit terraces of faith to the dismemberment of a rural estate and that mingling of the metaphorical and the realistic characterises much of the poetry. The decline of Catholic power and the losses that went with it is a kind of underlying event that drives much of the poetry. It permeates the portrait of the priest who is having a passionate affair, a boy’s desperate flight from boarding school, and a woman’s determined efforts to keep a marriage going. Harmon responds with compassion and understanding to abusive priests, to the homeless and the hapless, and to disturbing events in his own life. He writes in a variety of forms, elegies, narratives, nature poems, villanelles, satires. His humane perspective enables him to write sensitively about individuals and to consider how we fail to understand and to interpret historical events, such as the sieges of Drogheda and Limerick. Hoops of Holiness is the product of a mature and intelligent imagination.
POETRY
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669495 PB | 211 X 135MM | 102PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
THE FIRST FIVE STORMS Theophilus Kwek Winner of the 2016 New Poets' Prize, judged by Helen Mort "The First Five Storms has remarkable range and imaginative depth, from Fibonacci to Loch na Fuaiche, from the small detail of 'thawed streams like cracks in the bone' to a panorama of the whole 'lifting land'. These are poems that excavate, honour and renew." Helen Mort Theophilus Kwek is 22 and studying for a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies in Oxford. He has published three collections of poetry, most recently Giving Ground (2016). He won the Martin Starkie Prize in 2014, the Jane Martin Prize in 2015, and the New Poets’ Prize in 2016, and was recently placed Second in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, 2016. Having served as President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, he is the Co-Founder of The Kindling and a Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry. Having recently arrived in a country best-known for its weather, he charts the storms of history, language, place, and tradition in The First Five Storms.
POETRY
THE POETRY BUSINESS | £5.00 | 9781910367728 PB | 20PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
HOW TO BAKE A PLANET Pete Mullineaux From the Garden of Eden to the pavement of romance, outer space to bubble wrap, endangered species to climate change, Pete Mullineaux’s vivid and wide-ranging fourth collection explores personal-societal themes of loneliness, isolation, connection and dislocation; our ambivalent relationship with the natural world; ecological and environmental concerns; our confusions regarding science and religion; the elusive element of time. Philosophical, inventive, playful and fanciful at times, but always accessible and earthed by reality.
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SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669549 PB | 211 X 135MM | 74PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
Four Taxis Facing North presents us with the intimate, human face of Trinidad. These stories focus on characters from all social classes – and their infrequent and often uncomfortable interactions. Even as they are beset by fears about the future, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s women are also busy with their responsibilities, their relationships with husbands, partners, children, friends and foes. They deal with absent, unfaithful or abusive husbands and display differing degrees of self and social awareness. Four Taxis Facing North offers few comforting illusions. Hackshaw explores characters who are not always sympathetic – and the title story imagines a Trinidad after a great social upheaval in which survival means life of the bleakest kind. But the twelve stories in this collection offer great clarity and a deeply satisfying exactness of language in the creation of characters across the divisions of Trinidadian society.
FICTION
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233471 PB | 206 X 135MM | 226PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
THE GODDESS PROJECT Bryan Wigmore "Ancient terror, modern error, future era." Otter shook himself. " Mean much to you?" Two years after being washed up on a remote beach, freedivers Orc and Cass still have no idea who they are or where they came from. Worst of all, they feel like lovers but look like brother and sister, and must repress their instincts for fear of committing a terrible mistake. Now at last they’ve tracked down a psychic artefact powerful enough to restore their memories. But others also seek its forbidden magic. To reach it, deep within a sunken ruin, they must flirt with a ruthless occult conspiracy, one intent on summoning an ancient goddess to destroy the dreadnoughts of the Empyreal fleet. The depths of the sea, of the past, of the world’s collective mind: down there are truths, but also madness and despair. And a power that will plunge the world back to a new dark age, if it can’t be stopped.
POETRY FICTION
SNOWBOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911390220 PB | 198 X 129MM | 520PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
THE MALTHOUSES OF WARE David Perman Malt is the basic ingredient of beer, whisky and many foods. Malting was once one of Britain’s major industries and relics of that industry exist in many towns, now converted to other purposes. The Malthouses of Ware looks at the history of a major malting town, known for its ‘brown malt’ which for hundreds of years was used to make porter beer.
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ROCKINGHAM PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904851684 PB | 234 X 156MM | 96PP | 2 JANUARY 2017
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FOUR TAXIS FACING NORTH Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
THE DRAGON AND THE BOMB Andrew Wynn Owen In an island kingdom, Don Armando dreams of a dragon-slaying adventure like heroes used to perform. And in a laboratory in a gleaming city, scientist Haplo Nous tinkers towards an atom bomb. Past, present and future collide in a rip-roaring tale from the multi-award-winning Andrew Wynn Owen, full of rhythmical fireworks and joyous anachronism. This is a clash between chivalric heroics and modern scientifc enquiry, and a shaggy-dog story taking in farmers, fisherpeople, flying machines and general derring-do. Wynn Owen buoyantly reimagines Spenser in the satiric vein of Byron’s Don Juan, with a little bit of Monty Python thrown in.
POETRY
THE EMMA PRESS | £5.00 | 9781910139585 PB | 178 X 110MM | 36PP | 12 JANUARY 2017
MADWOMAN Shara McCallum Although at times haunting and elusive, the poems in Shara McCallum's latest collection Madwoman are transformative, seeking to chart and intertwine three stages of a mother's life from childhood to adulthood to motherhood. Rich with the complexities that join these states of being, the poems wrestle with the idea of being girl, woman and mother at once. McCallum questions how we form our identities and who shapes those identities for us. “These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and openminded - a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering music from poem to poem with - to use a beautiful phrase from the book, ‘each note tethering sound to meaning." Eavan Boland
POETRY
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233395 PB | 206 X 135MM | 72PP | 23 JANUARY 2017
REFUGEES AND PEACEKEEPERS Anna Johnson (ed.) This anthology of poems and short stories is the result of a writing competition Patrician Press ran in 2016. The entries were judged by Joceline Bury, Anna Johnson, Emma Kittle-Pey and Petra McQueen. The short-listed works, including that of the winner, Penny Simpson, are now published in the anthology. Further contributions from Patrician Press and other authors are as follows: Mark Brayley, Wersha Bharadwa, Emma Kittle-Pey, Petra McQueen, Suzy Norman, Robert Ronsson, Anna Vaught, Kenneth Steven and more. The book will be endorsed by George Szirtes, the Bishop of Barking and Robert McCrum and is edited by Anna Johnson who has also written the introduction. An offering from any proceeds will be made to Help Refugees.
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PATRICIAN PRESS | £9.00 | 9780993494567 PB | 216 X 138MM | 134PP | 31 JANUARY 2017
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LITTLE BLUE HUT Nancy Charley In 2011 Nancy Charley spent six weeks in a little blue beach hut on Tankerton Slopes, near Whitstable on the Kent coast, recording the changing tides and shifting moods of the shingle beach. Little Blue Hut is a book about weather and water, bladderwrack and gutweed, swimmers, dog-walkers and sea anglers, cormorants and blackheaded gulls, ‘resident birds’ and ‘transient people’. And always the horizon where sky merges with sea. In the first half of the book the Water-Watcher tells her tale, exploring the mysteries and the ‘bizarreries’ of the Thames Estuary and finding, like a beachcomber, myth and poetry in the rarely noticed details of everyday life. In the second half of the book a woman is summoned by the three female genii of the coast – Luna, Marina and Hertha. Helped by the birds, she discovers who she might be, whilst berthed in the safety of the Little Blue Hut.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780993454783 PB | 197 X 127MM | 64PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
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WHEN YOU LIVED INSIDE THE WALLS & OTHER STORIES Krishan Coupland This is the sixth book in the Thumbprint pocket book series and Krishan’s first collection of stories. At once dark and tender, mundane and extraordinary the stories here speak of strange realities where a child takes to living in the walls with the friends who love her, and a young man preserves the body of his lover who has returned from the dead in a freezer in his garage. Krishan Coupland writes in language elegant yet simple as if he were telling you a story while you shared a pot of tea or a bottle of beer. It’s this simplicity that belies a complexity of ideas and a mastery of the short form that is such a pleasure to read and makes this debut collection truly remarkable.
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STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 9781910413265 PB | 155 X 110MM | 48PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
EMERGENCY INDEX : VOLUME 5 Yelena Gluzman, Sophie Cleary & Katie Gaydos (ed.) The pages of Emergency INDEX are open to all who work with performance. In each annual volume, contributors document works made in the previous year. By including performances regardless of their country of origin, genre, aims, or popularity, INDEX reveals the breathtaking variety of practices used in performance work today. Each volume features a comprehensive index of key terms used by contributors in describing and discussing their own work. Begun in 2011, INDEX is a lens for seeing the field of contemporary performance from the ground up.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £20.00 | 9781937027759 PB | 209 X 133MM | 600PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
TWIST Pippa Little Twist is a slant look at the connections binding us together – familial, social, political – in poems which range from the curious and disturbing (via Mexican surrealist artists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington) to memories and evocations of the ordinary magic at work in our lives. It meditates on growing into middle age and explores how, obliquely and almost unseen, grief and loss transform into grace and redemption
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ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345887 PB | 216 X 137MM | 80PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
A comprehensive volume about St David, the patron saint of Wales. It contains information about the life of David, his religion, the myths associated with him, the history of St David’s Day and lists the churches named after him. This highly readable volume will include black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the book.
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Y'LOLFA | £6.99 | 9781784613723 PB | 160PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
PENNY LANE AND ALL THAT Ann Carlton A celebration of growing up in Liverpool’s Penny Lane neighbourhood in the 1940s and 1950s – a place and time very familiar to the Quarrymen/Beatles who celebrated it in their well-known song of that name. The book contains vivid insights into the poverty, affluence and cultural diversity that existed in the city at the time. It suggests experience of these is one of the city’s great strengths and contributes to the Scouse sense of humour and desire for justice.
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Y'LOLFA | £9.99 | 9781784613693 PB | 215 X 149MM | 192PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
RETURN FROM DARKNESS Graham Jones The savage Mabinogi story of the Twrch Trwyth brings ‘myth’ into the adult lives of three ordinary people who first hear the story years previously on a sixth-form school trip. The spirit of the Boar returns in a modern setting affecting the lives, romances and beliefs of everyone who come near it while contesting the widely-held belief that it represents evil. The story travels from Canterbury, New Zealand, to Tara, the ancient capital of Ireland; from the outer world to the darkness of the lower world, from reality to fantasy, but it takes place mostly in the magical hills and groves of north Pembrokeshire where it continues even today, barely below the surface.
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Y'LOLFA | £8.99 | 9781784613716 PB | 195 X 130 MM | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
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IN PURSUIT OF SAINT DAVID Gerald Morgan
THE DEEP HEART'S CORE Eugene O'Connell (ed.) The Deep Heart’s Core is a unique anthology of contemporary Irish poetry in which invited poets choose one of their own key or ‘touchstone’ poems and offer a prose sketch of its genesis, background or composition. The resulting volume is both a timely reminder of the diversity and vitality of contemporary poetry from Ireland, but also a fascinating insight into poem-making itself and, as such, is sure to be of interest to writers and students as well as general readers of verse. Containing work by: Moya Cannon, John F. Deane, Theo Dorgan, Pat Boran, Martina Evans, Vona Groarke, Michael Hartnett, Brendan Kennelly, John McAuliffe, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leanne O’Sullivan, Matthew Sweeney & Grace Wells.
POETRY
DEDALUS PRESS | £13.00 | 9781910251188 PB | 216 X 140MM | 250PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
DEVIL'S HIGHWAY Simon Bestwick In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn’t tire, stop, or die. It exists only for one purpose: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn. Meanwhile, Helen is threatened both from without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn’s death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen’s nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels’ base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett’s obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive. With the fate of the rebellion in the balance, Helen faces her deadliest challenge yet, pitted in single combat against an unstoppable killer, commanding armies in a bloody and pitiless battle – and, at last, confronting the demons of her past on the Black Road.
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SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679917 PB | 198 X 129MM | 320PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
SHINING ONES Steven Savile Jude Lethe is not a field agent. He's the behind-the-scenes technical whizzkid who makes it possible for the Ogmios Special Ops to operate effectively. Sir Charles Wyndham's covert team relies on Lethe for vital mission data, access to protected systems, real-time surveillance and for covering their tracks. Without him, Ogmios would cease to function. Now an old friend of Wyndham's, Professor Camila Morais, needs help. Her search for a lost Inca city stalls when key members of her team are kidnapped from Lima airport. A reluctant Lethe is dispatched to provide technical help, with Noah Larkin as his bodyguard. But Professor Morais is not the only one eager to find the secret city hidden deep within the Andes. An old terrorist organization is about to reveal it is anything but extinct. The Shining Path have returned, and their plans will have a profound and deadly effect on Peru, the continent, and the world.
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SNOWBOOKS | £6.99 | 9781911390268 PB | 198 X 129MM | 210PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
Victoria Bean’s second collection is about trouble – those who cause it, those who are looking for it, and those who have found it. It’s a social document and a forensic study of a criminal justice system where the action always seems to take place out of the corner of your eye. It’s a portrait in verse of the modern city from Gin Lane to Smack City, drawing on the found-poetry of graffiti, tattoos, court-statements and London phone-box ‘tart-cards’. Liberties is a book about the nameless, the blameless and the shameless, about needs and wants, desperate truths and unbelievable lies, about the good, the bad and the fine line we all walk between them; about liberties taken and liberties lost.
POETRY
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780993454790 PB | 197 X 127MM | 64PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
ARTICLES OF WAR Marilyn Longstaff When Marilyn Longstaff’s Salvation Army Officer parents dedicated her to God, they promised to keep her from jewellery, finery and other worldly pleasures. At the age of fourteen, she signed the Army’s ‘Articles of War’, vowing to reject ‘the values of the world’, to be ‘a faithful steward’ of her time, body, mind and spirit, and to abstain from ‘all else that could enslave the body or spirit.’ Articles of War is a book about a jealous God, a fondly remembered childhood and English seaside holidays perfectly balanced between hope and disappointment. It is a book about a life haunted by ‘the ghost of a faith she’s lost’, about rules and hierarchies, belief and freedom and the small steps that pave the path to hell.
POETRY
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780993454769 PB | 197 X 127MM | 80PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
WHAT RAIN TAUGHT US Gail Ashton What rain taught us follows a mind fracturing into a subjective landscape of association, reflection and invention, where words, images, and conflicting voices tumble and echo almost to the point of destruction. But, gradually, islands of stability form... Intimate, disturbing and touching, this collection offers an insight into mental illness as heartbreaking as Unica Zurn’s The Man of Jasmine or Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, and combines writing that is both delicate and raw with graphics and concrete forms. In What rain taught us, Gail Ashton pushes her writing to new levels.
POETRY
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9780993168284 PB | 216 X 140MM | 74PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
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LIBERTIES Victoria Bean
STORME PASSAGE David Batten In the aftermath of a foreign war a man puts up his tent somewhere on the west coast of France, self-exiled from what he sees as encroaching dangers of a life that doesn’t fit, and there falls into the orbit, the gravitational pull of cosmic forces, themselves working out their own accommodation. He keeps a diary. £4.99 | 9781910836620 | 28PP
CURIOUS VOICES Gillian Laker These poems are inspired by items from the collection of The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge in Canterbury, bringing to life the curious voices of objects with a deftness of touch enhanced by the accompanying drawings. £4.99 | 9781910836613 | 32PP
DRESSING UP Giles L Turnbull These poems use energetic and open free verse forms to evoke the slippery and mercurial nature of contemporary urban experience, and have a conspicuous command of voice and tone, so that they are very lively but also capable of shifting, with high intelligence, into more meditative modes. £4.99 | 9781910836576 | 26PP
THE BOOK OF BREAST Dana Littlepage Smith
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD Rebecca Gethin
This sequence takes the challenging subject of breast cancer, and, while regarding it with the appropriate seriousness, also treats it with an inventiveness and wit that asks telling questions about the cultural meanings that breasts have acquired. Assured, intelligent and engaging, this is important writing leavened with innovation.
A young mother dies of cancer. Years later her daughter £4.99 | 9781910836590 | 38PP finds letters, the only time she has ever seen her mother’s hand, and begins to write in response. DUNG BEETLES NAVIGATE BY STARLIGHT Poignant, beautifully controlled and resounding with humanity and exquisite imagery, All the Time in the World Sarah Watkinson is a stand-out pamphlet from Rebecca Gethin, author These poems explore the boundary between science and poetry, and juxtapose the lexicon of organic chemistry, in of two previous poetry collections and two novels.
particular, with a botanical discourse which is more conventional in poetry, but which the scientific treatment defamiliarises.
'Snowdrops' My mother speaks the language of snowdrops, her accent frail and reticent though the words spear frozen soil and poke from leaf litter. Her sentences survive all weathers: pounded and battered by wind and rain, chilled by frost, they bounce back, irrevocably white. Their drops of hope arrive in the dark days, when the cold gives them strength. What there’s no word for, is death.
£4.99 | 9781910836606 | 40PP 1 FEBRUARY 2017
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£4.99 | 9781910836583 | 32PP
ENCOUNTER Nick Jones Nick Jones’s debut collection is rich in experience and imagery. He is a keen observer of life and brings an artist’s vision and a surgeon’s sure touch to memory, place and the human condition in these pared down, accessible and deceptively simple poems, allowing us to encounter the world in a fresh way. £4.99 | 9781910836637 | 24PP
In his fourth full collection, Omar Sabbagh’s finely tuned ear is increasingly accute to the nuances of love and life, belonging and exile. His voice is distinctive, sharp, intense and the cool turn of phrase belies the daring, passion and constant push against the darkness concealed beneath the surface of every line. Honest, thoughtful and with an instinctive grasp of the human condition, To the Middle of Love is a vivid collection that startles, challenges and delights at every turn.
POETRY
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836507 PB | 218 X 140MM | 92PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
HIGH CITY WALK Adam Craig Side-stepping genre as easily as it bends the rules of common reality, these seventeen stories interweave threads of grief and loneliness, yearnings for ages and lives lost and yet to be found, and the transformative power of love and its capacity for destruction. Lyrical, surreal, mythical or everyday, High City Walk spans past, present and futures as possible as they are cataclysmic, yet always it takes you to the heart of its characters’ dreams and nightmares and finds that, often, there is hope in the worst of situations.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836538 PB | 216 X 140MM | 198PP | 1 FEBRUARY 2017
THE PAIN TREE Olive Senior Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is, along with her characteristic “gossipy voice”, reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the Second World War to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.
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PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233488 PB | 206 X 135MM | 296PP | 6 FEBRUARY 2017
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TO THE MIDDLE OF LOVE Omar Sabbagh
REAL GLASGOW Ian Spring Revisiting his native city Ian Spring’s new book charts how it has changed over the last forty years. In it he visits the city’s landmarks, and also his personal landmarks, overlaying the current map of Glasgow with the map in his memory. Among the shipyards of Govan, the tombs of the Necropolis and the dark beauty of St Mungo’s cathedral, the cathedrals of Ibrox and Hampden Park, the disappearing tenements, the growing café culture and old fashioned pubs Spring recalls the vitality of past times and finds a new and different contemporary vitality. The characters of his childhood (as featured in the work of Billy Connolly, for example) largely hewn from heavy industry, brownstone courts and socialism have largely been reduced by education, the service industries and the benefits of consumerism. But as Real Glasgow attests the city still has its idiosyncracies and essentially Glaswegian aspects to be found nowhere else. Exploration and celebration this book leaves the informed and entertained about one of the most famous cities in the world.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723111 PB | 208 X 135MM | 240PP | 7 FEBRUARY 2017
DOGTOOTH Fran Lock Dogtooth is a book about ghosts: ghosts as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends, but also as in the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation. There’s folklore in it, the current that we carry and that which carries us; the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories can do. It’s also about memory, the strategies that poetry has for keeping those we’ve lost alive. “It goes swaggering through town like a vivid old-time circus, commandeering all five senses till they start to fuse with each other.” Glyn Maxwell
POETRY
OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103841 PB | 216 X 136MM | 13 FEBRUARY 2017
TODAY THE BIRDS WILL SING: COLLECTED POEMS Helen Burke Since the mid-1980s, Helen Burke’s poems have appeared in pamphlets, on greetings cards, on pieces of origami, on radio, on tape, on CD, on the side of stray dogs and in a million other places – including, more recently, two collections from Valley Press. After months of work tracking down all these literary gems, the result is Today the Birds Will Sing; which abandons the ‘slim volume’ approach, instead offering a comprehensive, exhaustive treasury of Helen’s work, spanning more than 250 pages in a beautiful (and very red) hardback edition. Besides the poems, it is also filled with Helen’s truly unique illustrations, and reams of notes explaining where all these poems came from. We feel it’s no overstatement to say this is the one book that everyone should own; an unprecedented and unexpected treat that should entertain Helen’s fans, new and old, for the next few centuries at least.
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VALLEY PRESS | £30.00 | 9781908853691 HB | 256PP | 16 FEBRUARY 2017
Second City showcases the best of Birmingham: a rich, varied and vibrant city capable of inspiring a range of contemporary poetic responses. This anthology, bringing together entries from the inaugural Verve Poetry Festival Competition, depicts a second city which is no longer content to play second fiddle. Poets take on the area’s musical past, its complex industrial history, its unique blend of architectural styles and the experiences of its many immigrant communities. Writers celebrate the lives of significant figures, from Matthew Boulton to Benjamin Zephaniah, and ordinary Brummies alike. Ranging from spoken word-inspired pieces to more traditional styles, much of the work collected here channels the energy and the political anger that runs like a seam through centuries of Birmingham history. Taken together, Second City is a tough, unsentimental love letter to the Midlands metropolis, which finds beauty in concrete and unity in contradiction.
POETRY
THE EMMA PRESS | £10.00 | 9781910139608 PB | 184 X 123MM | 80PP | 16 FEBRUARY 2017
WRITING ON WATER Maggie Harris Maggie Harris’ short-story collection Writing on Water is informed by voices of the Caribbean where she was born and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. These are stories of migration and survival, of children and families brought together or torn apart. Maggie writes poetry and prose and won the poetry section of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2014.
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SEREN | £8.99 | 9781781723708 PB | 198 X 129MM | 192PP | 18 FEBRUARY 2017
WITH PAPER FOR FEET Jennifer A McGowan Jennifer A McGowan’s collection of themed narrative poems is steeped in the traditions of oral storytelling and folklore. Each section addresses a different source: world folk stories, Shakespeare and the Iliad; skillfully mining old stories for new truths, giving a voice to silent characters, or an alternative take on the accepted view - especially of women.
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ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909208353 PB | 198 X 129MM | 112PP | 23 FEBRUARY 2017
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SECOND CITY: POEMS ABOUT BIRMINGHAM Hannah Silva & Rachel Piercey (ed.)
FORAGING Joy Howard Joy Howard has something to say about the environment, and grief, and time, and memory. Her combination of tender but acute observation and mordant wit is reminiscent of U.A. Fanthorpe.
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ARACHNE PRESS | £7.99 | 9781909208391 PB | 198 X 129MM | 48PP | 23 FEBRUARY 2017
HEAT SIGNATURE Siobhán Campbell Siobhán Campbell is an Irish author noted for poems characterized by keen intelligence, cool skepticism, rich textures and wryly witty observations. Her new collection from Seren, Heat Signature, continues her fascination with power and responsibility as she skewers our most cherished notions in sharply memorable poems. There is a beautiful ruthlessness to her poetry. This collection is composed in her characteristically spikey voice: infused with an intelligence that resists easy answers to the conundrums that have faced her Irish homeland, but also suffused with a grudging admiration for the citizens who have survived their tumultuous history. Likewise her ‘nature’ poems observe a natural world either compromised by human interference, or on the brink where nature is about to take its revenge. While these are poems of moral tension, of provocation, they also artful: full of marvelously terse textures, of clashing consonants, subtle rhymes and insistent rhythms.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723685 PB | 216 X 138MM | 72PP | 23 FEBRUARY 2017
BASIC NEST ARCHITECTURE Polly Atkin Polly Atkin’s debut poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, is complex, vivid and moving. Based in Grasmere, in the Lake District, the author is inspired by the landscape and by the famous Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, who have walked there and written about the fells and lakes. Nature is a guiding presence, but the author’s personal story, of enduring a little-known and sometimes debilitating illness, is also the backdrop to this striking poetry. Formally, this work is more akin to the metaphysical poets in its fervent use of metaphor, in its multiple layers of meaning, in its quest for answers to the most pressing questions of mortality.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723739 PB | 216 X 138MM | 72PP | 27 FEBRUARY 2017
Keshiki, from Strangers Press, is a series of 8 exquisitely designed chapbooks showcasing some of the most exciting new writing from Japan. It includes stories from well-known writers such as Natsuki Ikezawa and Yoko Tawada and also introduces newer voices such as Masatsugu Ono, Kyoko Yoshida and Aoko Matsuda. Keshiki is the launch project of the new Strangers Press: a collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Norwich University of the Arts, and Writers’ Centre Norwich. Strangers Press specialises in bringing international writing to new audiences in the U.K. as part of Norwich, UNESCO City of Literature. Keshiki is funded by the Nippon Foundation and will launch in February. AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD Masatsugu Ono £6.99 | 9781911343066 | 32PP
MIKUMARI Misumi Kubo £6.99 | 9781911343073 | 32PP
TIME DIFFERENCES Yoko Tawada £6.99 | 9781911343011 | 32PP
FRIENDSHIP FOR ADULTS Nao-Cola Yamazaki £6.99 | 9781911343028 | 32PP
THE GIRL WHO IS GETTING MARRIED Aoko Matsuda £6.99 | 9781911343059 | 32PP
TRANSPARENT LABYRINTH Keiichiro Hirano £6.99 | 9781911343080 | 32PP
SPRING SLEEPERS Kyoko Yoshida £6.99 | 9781911343035 | 32PP
MARIKO/MARIQUITA Natsuki Ikezawa £6.99 | 9781911343042 | 32PP 27 FEBRUARY 2017
KESHIKI BOX SET Beautifully designed slipcase set containing all 8 of the titles. £40.00 | 9781911343004
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KESHIKI
GOLD ADORNMENTS AND OTHER STORIES Emma Kittle-Pey This is a short collection of witty stories and vignettes; of the niceties and falsities the characters encounter while, for example, shopping for bras or in domestic confrontations with the washing machine repair man or the estate agent. This is Emma Kittle-Pey’s second short story collection for Patrician Press. Her first was Fat Maggie and other stories published in 2013.
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PATRICIAN PRESS | £8.00 | 9780995538696 PB | 28 FEBRUARY 2017
POETRY IRELAND REVIEW ISSUE 121 Eavan Boland (ed.) Poetry Ireland Review’s editorship rotates every six issues, and Issue 121 will be the first issue from Eavan Boland. Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College and Bowdoin College Dublin, and at the University of Iowa. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland’s previous works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). She is also a regular reviewer for The Irish Times. “Poetry Ireland Review, like Poetry Ireland itself, has been a mainstay of poets and poetry for so long. I'm excited to be editing the Review for the next year and I greatly look forward to the vitality of the new Irish poems I'll be seeing and including in these issues." Eavan Boland
POETRY
POETRY IRELAND | £10.00 | 9781902121642 PB | 234 X 156MM | 29 FEBRUARY 2017
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WRITING MOTHERHOOD Carolyn Jess-Cooke (ed.) This book presents a chorus of voices on the wonders and terrors of motherhood, and the ways that a creative life can be both ignited and/or disrupted by the pressures of raising children. Featuring thought-provoking essays, interviews and poetry by high-profile writers on their experiences of creating art while also engaged in the compelling, exhausting, exhilarating work of motherhood, this important anthology re-considers ‘the pram in the hallway’ as explosively nuanced. By engaging with both the creation of literature by mothers and literary representations of motherhood, the work is a vital exploration of the complexities of contemporary sexual politics, publishing, artistic creation, and 21st-century parenting. Entries include an insightful interview with Pulitzer prize-winning poet Sharon Olds, excerpts from Hollie McNish’s motherhood diary, Carol Ann Duffy’s beautiful portrait of being and having a daughter, and specially commissioned poems by Sinead Morrissey, Rebecca Goss, and many others. Crime fiction fans will enjoy CL Taylor’s witty essay, ‘How Motherhood Turned Me to Crime’, and Nuala Ellwood’s heart-wrenching depiction of miscarriage and loss.
SEREN | £12.99 | 9781781723760 PB | 208 X 135MM | 176PP | 9 MARCH 2017
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WHO KNOWS? Jeremy Toombs "Well, I’ve now spent more years in Bristol, England than I have anywhere else as an adult. That’s more than six years by the time you’ve read this. And though not many British folk would agree, I’ve lost a lot of that Kentucky accent; folks back home do look at me funny, ask me where I’m from. I am from Kentucky but do feel like I’m from a lot of different places spread out all over the world by now. Though my backpacking, living abroad days are mostly behind me, I’ve been fortunate to do some travelling these last couple of years though only for a week or two at a time as opposed to the months of freewheeling I was used to from my 20s. I feel the pull of Kentucky / Tennessee home now more than I ever have. I reckon that comes from having my own family and realizing how important family is. I’ve my own little boy now who you’ll meet in these poems. I’d say you’ll also meet, briefly, some of the more inner journeys I’ve been on as I gain a little age, thinking all the way back to my own childhood, farther back than my memory will go even."
POETRY
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136977 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 MARCH 2017
THE NAMELESS PLACES Richard Lambert "Richard Lambert’s voice carries a stately quietness through the line of his poems without the least sense of contrivance. He is certainly one to watch.” Tim Liardet “Richard Lambert has the true poet’s gift for transcending the commonplace...” John Mole Richard Lambert’s poetry has been described as startling and spare, and this, his second full-length collection, is and certainly both of these. He writes about desolate man-made environments, weather-torn open spaces, the natural world and its inhabitants – and water is everywhere. Yet these are not depressing poems. There is a delicacy, compassion and numinosity about them which makes this an intriguing and compelling collection.
POETRY
ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781911469001 PB | 216 X 137MM | 64PP | 1 MARCH 2017
A CHILDHOOD IN A WELSH MINING VILLAGE Vivian Jones Vivian Jones recounts with great warmth his childhood in a poor family within the community of a small mining village in the Welsh Valleys in the 1930s, and what influence growing up in that environment has had on the man he is today. From the all-pervading influence of chapel culture to local people’s obsession with the cinema, a wealth of anecdotes about his valley (Cwmamman), the village (Garnant), local characters, community initiatives, school, the mining industry, growing up in a poor family and much, much more brings the detail of this time, place and culture vividly back to life.
NONFICTION
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Y'LOLFA | £9.99 | 9781784613754 PB | 240PP | 1 MARCH 2017
Today there is one surviving handball court in Wales, in the village of Nelson in the Rhymney Valley. But travel back two centuries and the game was a national obsession, with people travelling from far and wide to watch thrilling matches between the sporting heroes of the day. Fortunes were won and lost through side stakes and illegal gambling, and countless bylaws were put in place to try to stop the game spreading to any likely-looking blank wall. In this book, Nelson handball player Kevin Dicks’ meticulous research traces the long history and varying fortunes of this folk sport, from its medieval churchyard (and possibly even earlier) roots, through its glory years in the 18th and 19th centuries and its links with the mining industry, to its sad decline in the 20th century, and its modernisation today.
NONFICTION
Y'LOLFA | £12.99 | 9781784613761 PB | 300PP | 1 MARCH 2017
NEWS FROM NOWHERE Jane Austin It is 1914 in Bangor, North Wales. Bronwyn is sixteen and her three brothers, Huw, Glyn and Aubrey, and her Methodist Minister father Tada, will leave for the Western Front. Bangor, a quiet backwater, sees the arrival of destitute Belgians, men coming home wounded, and women in leading roles. Bronwyn takes on responsibility at the Methodist Book Room as well as helping Mam send endless parcels to the front. The war is brought home in her brothers’ letters, by turn light-hearted and searingly honest. As the family copes with uncertainty and loss, Bronwyn finds first love and becomes involved in political activism, going on to volunteer at a London Military Hospital run by suffragists and travelling to France. Bronwyn knows that one day she will write about the aftermath of war, but when the war ends its toll on her family continues and Bronwyn faces new losses and challenges before she can move on with her life.
FICTION
CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836545 PB | 197 X 130MM | 330PP | 1 MARCH 2017
UNDER THE PIPAL TREE Anjana Cowdhury Rohini, a wealthy Indian woman of Mumbai discovers a shocking truth about her identity. As she struggles with the truth and battles with periods of depression, Rohini develops a candid and supportive relationship with her therapist. Maria, her childhood nanny, unravels their past. The stories of the two women merge and each learns something from the other. Indira, Rohini’s mother, pragmatic and outspoken, is the tent pole of the three women’s relationship. In a tale of secrets, and social prejudices, the three redefine their boundaries with each other and the world.
FICTION
CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836552 PB | 216 X 140MM | 330PP | 1 MARCH 2017
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MARCH
HANDBALL: THE STORY OF WALES' FIRST NATIONAL SPORT Kevin Dicks
THIS IS THE END OF THE STORY Jan Fortune Belief is Cassie’s gift, so much so that she believes herself to be whoever those in her life tell her she is — Cassie, Kat, Kitty, even, as Miriam insists, Casilda, an 11th century Muslim princess from Toledo. Cassie’s loyalty to Miriam’s extraordinary internal world survives a traumatic incident on a beach and a coming of age fraught with hostility, but is strained by an act of betrayal that propels her towards Liam, another person waiting to tell Cassie who she really is. But Cassie may be more resourceful than either Miriam or Liam imagine. Caught in a labyrinth of friendship, hope and obligation, she must decide her own identity, and when she visits Toledo, tracking down the elusive Casilda, is this the end of the story? A Quixotic coming of age novel exploring the ways we enter the fantasy lives of those we love.
FICTION
CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9780993168277 PB | 216 X 140MM | 206PP | 1 MARCH 2017
THOMAS JONES OF PENCERRIG: ARTIST, TRAVELLER, COUNTRY SQUIRE Richard Veasey The biography of Welsh eighteenth-century landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742–1803). Following in the footsteps of his master Richard Wilson, he travelled to Italy in 1776 and spent six-and-a-half years there; first in Rome among English artists; then in Naples where he was welcomed into the local artistic milieu. The book traces the development of his career from boyhood until his return to England in 1783. It then considers in detail his life and work as a gentleman farmer from 1787, when he inherited the family estate in Radnorshire, until his death in 1803. As he was the first British artist to write his memoirs, the penultimate chapter is devoted to what he achieved as a writer.
NONFICTION
Y'LOLFA | £12.99 | 9781784613709 PB | 215 X 140MM | 1 MARCH 2017
WHAT LIES WITHIN Adam Craig (ed.) Finding unexpected routes through the worlds of truth and lies each one of us weaves each day, worlds in which ‘truth’ takes on a different meaning each time. What Lies Within features original and competition-winning prose and poetry from Patricia Debney, Jan Fortune, Jean Harrison, Nigel Hutchinson, Judy Kendall, Donna Kirstein, Jane Lovell, Pete Marshall, Jane Monson, Jez Noond, Joanne Stryker, Ashley Lloyd Smith, and David Mark Williams.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £4.99 | 9780993168260 PB | 210 X 148MM | 48PP | 1 MARCH 2017
“This collection has for its central focus scenes from contemporary China, observing with detachment and direct emotional intent those personal landscapes which fan out from [Edward] Ragg’s experiences of a country undergoing profound change. Such landscapes and the burdening memories accompanying them create poems of concentrated philosophical energy. They search and question. Ragg explores paths and places across a world shot through with colour. Yet he reins back from the expected celebratory note, in order to sift truth from falsehood, to travel from height to abyss. This is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection.” Penelope Shuttle
POETRY
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836514 PB | 216 X 140MM | 84PP | 1 MARCH 2017
ARGO Steven Savile During a time that man has forgotten, a mighty ship was laid to rest beneath the rolling waves of the Aegean Sea. With her, the secrets and powers of the Gods lay, waiting to be discovered... Orla Nyren is a spy, a mercenary, a stone cold killer. The last thing she will ever do is let her guard down. Forced into time off from the Ogmios Team, she finds herself in unfamiliar territory: vacationing with civilians in the Peloponnese. A late night encounter with a handsome stranger offers her a glimpse into a side of life she has never allowed herself to imagine: normalcy, freedom, love. But old secrets refuse to stay buried and when the ship is exhumed, her vacation takes a drastic turn. With the help of fellow team member, Jude Lethe, Orla embarks on an adventure that will return her to the myths of old in which the unthinkable is made real and the horrors of man’s resolve threaten to seal the doom of humanity.
FICTION
SNOWBOOKS | £6.99 | 9781911390282 PB | 192 X 129MM | 210PP | 1 MARCH 2017
LOLA RIDGE: COLLECTED EARLY POEMS Daniel Tobin (ed.) Transnational long before the term gained currency, Lola Ridge was one of the most notable poets writing in America from the publication of her first book, The Ghetto, in 1918 until her death in 1941. Political anarchist, staunch advocate for women’s rights, worker’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of African Americans, Ridge was a social and literary trailblazer whose poetry set its sights on the neglected, the transgressed, just beyond the pale of mainstream modernism. This new edition of Lola’s Ridge’s collected early poems intends to redress the serious neglect her own work has endured over the past seventy-five years. With this publication Lola Ridge’s important place in the history of twentieth-century poetry takes a significant step toward being recognised and restored.
POETRY
LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £16.99 | 9780993505645 PB | 234 X 156MM | 412PP | 1 MARCH 2017
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HOLDING UNFAILING Edward Ragg
SPIRAL STAIRCASE Hirato Renkichi Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance. Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of DADA and Surrealist literature in pre-war Japan. “A momentous, of-the-moment figure little known in the English-speaking world.” David Grubbs “It’s hard to fathom how a poet with such balls could go under the radar for nearly one hundred years.” Lisa Jarnot
POETRY
UGLY DUCKLING | £12.00 | 9781937027667 PB | 203 X 133MM | 208PP | 1 MARCH 2017
ALL WELCOME / THE HAPPY END Mónica de la Torre All Welcome / The Happy End is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. Mónica de la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants. At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.
POETRY
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £14.00 | 9781937027735 PB | 203 X 133MM | 128PP | 1 MARCH 2017
HALF THE HUMAN RACE Susan Utting Half the Human Race includes poems from three previous collections, alongside new work reflecting and developing earlier themes of the lives of women, particularly those who are too often overlooked, unseen, hidden, or silenced. There is loss and struggle here: the pain of miscarriage, the hopeless dreams of an exhausted hotel worker, the elective mutism of a traumatised school girl. But there is also much celebration, recognition and praise. There’s a Miracle, a Charm, a mythological Sea Orphan; but these poems are tangibly real, about real women’s lives. And as always, Susan Utting’s poems are proud lovers of sound, rhythm, of the cacophony of living. As Philip Gross wrote, reviewing her work, “Utting unashamedly loves language, and language seems to love her back.”
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TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747258 PB | 216 X 138 MM | 112PP | 1 MARCH 2017
In these witty, postmodern stories, Prabda Yoon riffs on pop culture, experiments with punctuation, flirts with sci-fi and, in a metafictional twist, mocks his own position as omnipotent author. Highly literary, his narratives offer an oblique reflection of contemporary Bangkok life, exploring the bewildering disjunct and oft-hilarious contradictions of a modernity that is at odds with many traditional Thai ideas on relationships, family, school and work. Credited with having ‘brought fresh energy to Thai literature with his distinctive urban voice’, Yoon’s is the voice of a new generation, responding to his country’s recent and rapid urbanisation with fresh, off-beat perspectives and exciting formal innovation. The collection from which the majority of the stories in The Sad Part Was are taken made the young author a household name when it was published in 2002 and won the S.E.A. Writers Award. Two of its stories have been excerpted in Two Lines Journal, and Yoon already has a fan in prominent critic Scott Esposito. One story is currently being made into a feature film.
FICTION
TILTED AXIS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911284062 PB | 198 X 129MM | 175PP | 3 MARCH 2017
The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya Before she disappeared, she was spotted arm in arm with a bald, burly, Russian. At least that was the rumour, picked up and passed on by the motorbike-taxi drivers who plied their trade at the entrance to Pattaya Walking Street. But some of the local bar girls recalled otherwise. Russian my ass, they said, She left with a boy, a skinny kid, eight years old, or maybe ten. The drivers were one hundred percent certain that she was dead – murdered. They were willing to bet that her body would have been hacked to pieces, stuffed into a trash bag, weighted down, and then tossed into the ocean not too far from the shore. The bar girls, on the other hand, were convinced that she and the boy had gone overseas. Maybe even to Europe, to start a new life. Good for her, they said, Human blood is all contaminated nowadays. There's no way of telling what filth you might be drinking. If a vampire can manage to quit the habit, she ought to get out of the game while she still can. Sure, people might say she's betraying her own kind, or even herself, but so what? Being a vampire in Pattaya isn't what it was. That’s the long and short of it. And the official line taken by the police? According to them, she'd never existed in the first place. And as someone who doesn't exist can't flee the country any more than they can get hacked to bits, there was nothing for them to investigate. You’d have to be crazy to think we'd waste our time on a tall tale like that. If you’re talking about the bar girls, the whores, the lady boys, the chicks with dicks, the go-go dancers, the drug dealers, OK, fair enough, them you'll find everywhere . As for the Russian mafia, let's both do ourselves a favour and leave that one well alone. But the vampires of Pattaya? That’s nothing but a story people made up to keep their kids from straying too near the Walking Street. You're not going to buy that shit, are you? the elderly coconut vendor spat, his voice dripping scorn. Of course she existed. She bought two of my coconuts. One for herself, one for her victim. She had a big heart, that vampire. No matter how widely opinions diverged as to the nature and cause of her disappearance, almost everyone maintained that she had been a creature of flesh and blood, and oh, what flesh and blood it had been! You'd have had to see her for yourself to understand. Those dark eyes might stir up a shiver of fear but they also held you rapt, and not through any kind of sorcery, but because her beauty cast a spell of its own. When the wind caught her long black hair, it streamed out behind her like a piece of the night sky had come undone. She wasn’t a Pattaya native, and the local vampires considered her something of an upstart, a common “bloodsucker” encroaching on their territory. This was partly snobbery and partly envy; when it came to luring victims, she was far more successful than those who prided themselves on their “authenticity,” on employing only the “classical” techniques. Nevertheless, she won the respect and even the adoration of a small group of vampires from the younger generation. Already dazzled by her beauty, these impressionable youths were fully won over after she promised to always share her victims.
Her name was Rattika.
Though of course, this was all hearsay; anyone who claimed to have it 'straight from the vampires’ mouth' was as full of shit as the police. Pattaya vampires didn't give interviews, and they weren’t the types to get cornered for a chat. They were the ones who made advancesto stalk others, and those they did approach were unlikely to feel grateful for the attention.vampire herself. But see? Someone got murdered exactly like we said. An extract from 'The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya', taken from The Sad Part Was by Prabda Yoon.
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THE SAD PART WAS Prabda Yoon
MISSING PERSONS Hilary S. Jacqmin The first half of this, Hilary Jacqmin’s first collection of poems, is grounded in her own life, and details her upbringing in Northern Ohio through a series of sometimes comic and sometimes serious vignettes. It then moves on to adulthood, and grapples with the difficult realities of the workplace and relationships. In the second half of the book, the focus changes, moving between a variety of locales, times, and personas both real and imagined. Considering questions of empire and autonomy, the poems jump from imperial India to post-meltdown Chernobyl. This section includes a series of circus poems set in America and on the Continent. Richly detailed, linguistically deft, and employing both formal and free verse, Missing Persons explores the strangeness of streetcar suburbs and the domestic’s intersection with the larger world.
POETRY
WAYWISER PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904130871 PB | 198 X 129MM | 90PP | 15 MARCH 2017
COME LET US SING ANYWAY Leone Ross A brave and exciting collection that entertains with wit, shocks with frankness, and engages both intellect and emotion. Richly varied, it ranges from extended stories to intense pieces of flash fiction. Stories may be set in realistic settings – but develop magical narrative twists that make us see all afresh. Others begin in fantasy – returnees from the dead, a man who finds discarded hymens – but are so skilfully realist we can only believe in their actuality. “Leone Ross has a powerful style, a taste for complex organisation and a strong imagination...” World Literature Today
FICTION
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233341 PB | 234 X 156MM | 226PP | 20 MARCH 2017
MEAT SONGS Jack Nicholls In Meat Songs, the voices of humans and animals – living and dead – clamour for the reader’s attention. Pets are curious about being owned; headlice are curious about their strange habitat; a severed pig’s head is curious about an Oxford undergraduate’s decisions; and packaged meat products are ignoring the future. Through poetry, flash fiction and hybrid forms, this collection asks what animals might say to us, and suggests that despite everything they would not speak, but sing. This is the eighth in the series of the Emma Press Picks, which are short, themed and illustrated poetry pamphlets designed to be accessible and to appeal to people who might not usually pick up a poetry book.
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THE EMMA PRESS | £5.00 | 9781910139622 PB | 178 X 110MM | 36PP | 30 MARCH 2017
Loss, love and various severed body parts are scattered throughout this collection, that has its roots in the reality of family, friends and home, but reaches into the other worlds: the circus of possibilities (where insurance salesmen are trapeze artists), the home of ageing mermaids, London’s dryads, or a nineteenth century French brothel where Van Gogh’s ear doesn’t seem out of place. Some poems are dark psycho-thrillers, while others have a warm humour that tempts the reader to peep beneath the surface of things.
POETRY
THE EMMA PRESS | £6.50 | 9781910139646 PB | 198 X 129MM | 36PP | 16 MARCH 2017
TICKER-TAPE Rishi Dastidar From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit. Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.
POETRY
NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027171 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80PP | 24 MARCH 2017
LETTERS TO THE CULTURAL REHABILITATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED Andrea Inglese This book is composed of 17 letters written by an unemployed man and addressed to a vague entity – Cultural Rehabilitation. This Rehabilitation sometimes assumes the abstract and anonymous form of the institution, at others it is a public official, or a woman. The topics contained in the letters seem unclear and vague and the reader does not know if the letters were really ever exchanged. What does the sender wish to discuss? He sometimes writes about mental health, or love and disappointment, but also about work and a fragile social identity. The book has been translated from the original Italian into English by Sara Elena Rossetti.
POETRY
PATRICIAN PRESS | £9.00 | 9780995538610 PB | 130PP | 31 MARCH 2017
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DRAGONISH Emma Simon
‘Bianca, Bianca.’ Bianca was the aunt’s name. Even Marie Elena intimated this. Now the older Gaston whispered, ‘Clarita, Clarita, sweet Clarita,’ remembering the cicadas that scratched the air at noon when he was in his aunt’s arms at siesta.
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Gaston had learnt the art of love from a young aunt who had always liked the way he used to pronounce her name. It was his voice she liked and she would take him to bed with her at siesta saying, ‘Whisper my name,’ and he would put his boy’s lips to her ears as she fell asleep with him in her arms.
‘Your sisters send to say hello, your mother sends you these,’ and out of his pocket Gaston took a sugar-coated tamarind ball. He handed it to her with an outstretched hand, but she did not at first respond. She did not stir. She obeyed her Mother Superior. This was trickery. These were lies. This was wooing. The outstretched hand, the tamarind ball which she had peeped at, tantalised her. The tickling sensation she could feel between her toes, up her leg and in the nest of hair between her legs, as the first sugar-coated ants carrying the desire of Gaston got to her over the stone floor, crawling over the sticky fingers of his outstretched hand, broke down her resistance and her obedience to her Mother Superior. She sighed at his voice, ‘Clarita, sweet Clarita, your mother, Angustia, sends you these.’ That this warm voice was telling her about her mummy and her sisters, and had only just spoken her own name so deeply and gently, could only herald something good. This was what Gaston hoped she would think. She heard his whisper again: ‘Clarita, Clarita.’ Clarita bent down to scratch where the ants were tickling her. Then she lifted her eyes to the dreamer whom her Mother Superior had said wished to look at her face. There were no mirrors in the convent and Clarita had not seen her face for six months except for her reflection in the pool into which the fountain spilt. In the instant of her looking, in the instant of her sin, or should we say, felix culpa, Clarita was met with the eyes of Gaston. She saw her face reflected in his eyes. ‘Oh,’ she gasped, suddenly bewitched by her own beauty. His were large and brown and his face was in the shadow of a crown of black curls. Hers were the same pools of brown. We are twins, she thought. He wished he could uncover her head. ‘Abyssus abyssum invocat,’ as the psalmist says. One depth called to another. In the moment of her temptation, Clarita could hear her sisters at choir in the convent chapel intoning the Salve Regina. She knew they were praying for her, but the beauty of the chant seemed to lull her more into Gaston’s lure. She smiled, still not saying anything, but giggled and smiled as she licked the sugar off the first tamarind ball which she took from his outstretched hand, pulling at the stickiness of his fingers. Then she bent to scratch the inside of her leg where the ants were tickling her.
WITCHBROOM Lawrence Scott “Why was this book overlooked?” Salman Rushdie “What a powerful writer.... A Caribbean One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Fay Weldon “Rare and magical. The first of its kind... wonderful evocative language; complete emotional range; a loving, touching insight into human and family relationships.” Sam Selvon Witchbroom is a visionary history of a Caribbean Spanish/French Creole family and an island over four centuries – to 20th century independence. With an innovative tone and content, its carnival tales of crime and passion are told by the narrator Lavren, who is both male and female. First published in 1992, Witchbroom became a Caribbean classic. A pioneering work, it heralded a new generation of modernist Caribbean writers who, like Scott, broke away from a predominantly realist literary tradition; Witchbroom identifies more with magic realism. A richly entertaining and many layered read, its hermaphrodite narrator brings a contemporary flavour to the novel. The title Witchbroom refers to a fungus that attacks cocoa trees, and is also used as a metaphor for the decline of the island’s plantocracy.
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PAPILLOTE PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993108686 PB | 197 X 130MM | 360PP | 30 APRIL 2017
"
Gaston took another tamarind ball from his pocket and brushed off the ants which crawled over his arm in search of the sugar on the confectionery. ‘Here’s another,’ he said. Clarita took this second one almost greedily, continuing to lick on the first tamarind ball, but hurrying it, excited with the anticipation of the second. Then Gaston continued to feed her more of the innocent childhood sweets, which she liked because of the mixture of sweet and sour. ‘Here, take this’; he went further, picking up the crystals of sugar from around her mouth with his fingers. If she were a butterfly she would have fallen asleep, drunk with the nectar of the fruit balls.
This debut pamphlet of poems by DIY punk poet Jenn Hart is full of defiant statements, declarations of love and of war and portraits of dead women. Better Watch Your Mouth is a strong, unyielding testament to the power of female relationships, past and present, fictional and real. Jenn Hart is a poet, musician, blogger and activist living in Bristol. In 2013 she put together a small zine of poems which was apparently so good someone got the cover art tattooed on their leg.
POETRY
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136991 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 3 APRIL 2017
REQUIEM Razmik Davoyan After the Ottoman empire’s entry into the First World War on 29 October 1914, the Armenians were accused – in a few cases justly – of conspiring with the advancing Russian forces to ensure Turkish defeats. The legend of ‘Armenian treachery’ gave the Ottoman government the pretext to sanction measures designed to remove all traces of the Armenian population from the empire. For someone whose family suffered immeasurably, Requiem is an amazingly measured and considered narrative of loss and survival. In an attempt to answer the moral questions brought about by the event and its aftermath, Razmik Davoyan remembers and commemorates without bitterness.
POETRY
ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781908376787 PB | 216 X 127MM | 3 APRIL 2017
MEMORIAL TO THE FUTURE Volker von Törne It is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Törne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement – Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Törne’s collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Törne’s powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.
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ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345641 PB | 216 X 137MM | 3 APRIL 2017
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BETTER WATCH YOUR MOUTH Jenn Hart
ALL THE JOURNEYS I NEVER TOOK Rebecca Tantony All The Journeys I Never Took is a collection of poetry and prose which offer a personal account of what it’s like to leave behind the middle man- lover, father, priest- and discover our place in the world. A place which echoes with unravelling journeys, first dates, break ups, family and confidences. Sometimes confessional, sometimes political, this collection explores what a contemporary definition of home might be; something physical, a person, a concept best left behind or a destination to keep heading towards. Rebecca Tantony is an electric and mesmerising writer. Her work offers a tapestry of intricate themes, bold writing and passionate intensity, creating a lyrical conversation which speaks white hot words straight to the heart.
POETRY
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136984 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 3 APRIL 2017
FELLOWSHIP OF INK Paul Magrs A novel set in the 1930s with Brenda (of Brenda and Effie fame!) in an old university town. She's a housemaid who teams up with fictionalised versions of CS Lewis and Tolkien to battle demons from other dimensions and solve strange mysteries.
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SNOWBOOKS | £7.99 | 9781909679702 PB | 320PP | 3 APRIL 2017
THE MECHANICS OF LOVE Emma-Jane Hughes An intriguing and novel collection that explores the subtext of relationships, including the biological and neurological aspects that drive us, The Mechanics of Love is poetry at its most inventive, explored with a great deal of subtlety and sensitivity. The thoughtful tone and arresting images combine in convincing presentation to give distinctive and surprising debut.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836644 PB | 216 X 140 MM | 66PP | 3 APRIL 2017
There’s a lovely spare clarity to the beautifully sculpted prose poems that make up Lines in the Sky – a sense of poignancy that is always well controlled as themes of love, loss, memory, family and friendship weave together. The poet’s ear for music combine with his visual acuity to make this an accomplished debut collection, rich in a ective imagery, evocative and haunting. Accompanied by a CD of pieces set to music, Lines in the Sky, showcases a distinctive voice full of humanity and exploring the prose poetry form to maximum a effect.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836521 PB | 216 X 140MM | 48PP | 3 APRIL 2017
ANOTHER JUSTIFIED SINNER Sophie Hopesmith It’s the eve of the recession, but who cares? For commodity trader Marcus, life is good. So what if he’s a fantasist? So what if he wills his college sweetheart to death? So what if it’s all falling apart? This isn’t a crisis. Until it is. Misfortune strikes Marcus again and again, until finally he has to change. But can this English psychopath ever change? Maybe he needs to find himself? Maybe he needs to travel? Maybe he needs to help others? Maybe he needs to change his medication. Another Justified Sinner is a literary black comedy about the fall and rise and fall of Marcus, a slipper sinner. How difficult is it to change?
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DEAD INK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911585015 PB | 3 APRIL 2017
BORDERLANDS Donna Kirstein A debut pamphlet by a young, British-born, poet, Borderlands explores the points at which spaces and concepts touch, collide, or part. Inspired by the sense of dislocation she felt leaving Zimbabwe, where she had grown up, to return to the northern hemisphere, Donna Kirstein evokes the strangeness of a landscape familiar to us but alien to her, despite being born here, and of the slipperiness of the very words she uses to describe these experiences. This is work that makes the liminal central.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £4.99 | 9780993168291 PB | 210 X 148MM | 60PP | 3 APRIL 2017
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LINES IN THE SKY Richard Douglas Pennant
RUINS & OTHER STORIES Adam Craig (ed.) Seven award winning short stories from the Cinnamon Press Short Story Prize adjudicated by Adam Craig plus five stories from French translator and author, Isabelle Llasera make Ruins & other Stories a stand-out anthology. In her series of five stories, three of which are directly interlinked, Isabelle Llasera reflects on life in provincial France from the 1970s to the present. In Omar Sabbagh’s ‘Dye’ the Realist tradition is transcended into a metaphorical world of philosophic debate. An accomplished and disturbing exploration of inner space, Jez Noond’s ‘Squirrel Therapy’ explores the shifting of crucial human interactions to digital and computerised systems, and the increasingly inhuman nature of our communal environments. Bolvinder Banga’s ‘Sita in the Forest’ is a vivid and powerfully told example of the ‘slice of life’ strand of Realism.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836651 PB | 216 X 140MM | 240PP | 3 APRIL 2017
SUBJECT MATTERS Jeremy Robson “I love this collection.” Maureen Lipman After breaking a thirty-five year writer’s block with Blues in the Park, Jeremy Robson’s new collection of poems is his second book in three years. Subject Matters takes us into a world that is both contemporary and timeless. Many of these poems are personal, recalling the pleasure of a smile, a landscape or a song, and the lives of friends like Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Others evoke scenes and subjects from an earlier era – Dick Barton, Roy Rogers, Paris in the 1950s, London jazz clubs, CND rallies, telephone exchanges with sexy names – occasionally drawing on his Jewish experience to give context to his depiction of a modern world where violence explodes with increasing fury and the sirens rarely stop. All subjects that matter.
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SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £12.95 | 9780995563520 HB | 197 X 127MM | 84PP | 3 APRIL 2017
STRAYA Paul Summers straya is a book of hauntings, a parliament of ghosts, public and private, the story of a small-town Orpheus lost in the brusque shadows of a land-down-under. It’s a treatise on grief, atrocity and human tragedy seen through the eyes of a bewildered mourner in exile, a travelogue of land and soul unravelling the complex carnage of our redacted histories, a song-book of love and hate, of sorrow and celebration, of cold despair and stubborn hope.
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SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780995563513 PB | 197 X 127MM | 134PP | 3 APRIL 2017
Taking its title from the brown envelopes that strike fear into benefit-claimants and the biblical ‘Rapture’, Alan Morrison’s eighth collection imagines these letters as passports to a twisted Tory notion of salvation through benefit sanction. Tan Raptures is a series of verse-missives from the frontline of the war against the poor and its spirit-stripping weapons of food banks, poor doors and homeless spikes. It’s a people’s history, from Dale Farm and the firebombing of the Freedom Bookshop to Troika-shackled Athens, featuring the Bryant & May Matchgirls, the International Brigades, the Runnymede Diggers, Los Indignados, Gerrard Winstanley, Joe Hill, Wal Hannington, Conrad Noël and Christopher Caudwell. The title poem is a Catholic Socialist polemic in opposition to self-proclaimed ‘Roman Catholic’ Iain Duncan Smith’s despotic six year grip at the DWP.
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SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £8.99 | 9780995563506 PB | 197 X 127MM | 200PP | 3 APRIL 2017
IN THE FORESTS OF FREEDOM Lennox Honychurch The Maroons (escaped slaves) of Jamaica are famous. Not so the Maroons of another Caribbean island - Dominica, also a former British colony. Dominica’s Maroons once controlled much of this wild and mountainous island but few details of their story of resistance and ultimate defeat have been known - until now. Written by Dominica’s leading historian, In the Forests of Freedom is a stirring account of how a displaced and enslaved people challenged the British empire in their struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society. From the Africans who took refuge on the island in the 16th century, through the two brutal Maroon Wars in the last decades of slavery, to the building of a post-emancipation nation, In the Forests of Freedom takes the reader deep into the hinterland of the Dominica story.
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PAPILLOTE PRESS | £9.99 | 9780993108662 PB | 197 X 130MM | 3 APRIL 2017
PRIMERS VOLUME TWO Jacob Sam-La Rose (ed.) Primers Volume Two is part of a new annual scheme creating a unique opportunity for talented poets to find publication and receive a programme of supportive feedback, mentoring and promotion and is a collaboration between Nine Arches Press and The Poetry School to find the best of new voices in poetry. The anthology collects together the final four selected poets, and there is much here to delight and quietly dazzle, and much to make the future of poetry bright.
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NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027188 PB | 216 X 138MM | 100PP | 3 APRIL 2017
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TAN RAPTURES Alan Morrison
STAIRS AND WHISPERS: D/DEAF AND DISABLED POETS WRITE BACK Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka & Daniel Sluman (ed.) Stairs and Whispers: Disabled and D/deaf Poets Write Back is the first major UK anthology of contemporary disabled and D/deaf poets and represents the work of over forty writers. It will showcase a breadth of work from a broad range of poets and will also include essays on disability poetics and other topics. Lead by editors and poets Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman. The anthology is supported by Nine Arches Press, Writing West Midlands, Birmingham City University and Arts Council England and publication will be followed by launch events in June 2017. British Sign Language poetry films and podcast audio will also accompany the project.
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NINE ARCHES PRESS | £14.99 | 9781911027195 PB | 216 X 138MM | 200PP | 3 APRIL 2017
SILVER Steve Savile “There is a plague coming... For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now...” With this chilling message a wave of terror unlike anything the world has ever seen sweeps the streets of Europe. Thirteen martyrs burn themselves alive in thirteen major cities simultaneously. And this is just the beginning. A religious cult calling itself the Disciples of Judas has risen in the Middle East. They twist the words of ancient prophecies to drive home the fear. Everything you believe in will be proved wrong. Everything you hold true will fail. Day by day the West wakes to increasingly harrowing acts of terror. As fear cripples the capitals of Europe, the only question is where will be the next to fall? London? Rome? Berlin?
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SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390794 PB | 198 X 129MM | 416PP | 3 APRIL 2017
COLLECTED POEMS 1975-2015 John Robert Lee John Robert Lee’s Collected Poems tell both of a continuing journey and a subtly changing voice but also of an underlying, consistent attempt to hold together in one space the things that matter. This is seeking first the kingdom of God; maintaining the community of men and women who incarnate that kingdom and make life meaningful; the beauties of St Lucia’s natural world and its rich traditions of folk-culture; and the challenges and demands of poetry. Whilst sometimes Lee’s poems involve a quiet self-communing, more often they are conversations with God and with those people who are close to him. And whilst the poems connect to the wider world of travel and world affairs, their touchstone is always St Lucia. Like Derek Walcott, like Kendel Hippolyte, Jane King and now Vladimir Lucien, John Robert Lee’s poems demonstrate how possible it is to find an enriching, puzzlingly complex and intellectually stimulating world in a small island society.
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PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £10.99 | 9781845233518 PB | 206 X 1135MM | 212PP | 3 APRIL 2017
In direct narrative terms the poems in this collection relate to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin in Uganda, a war of liberation that brought its own barbarous atrocities. In political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing aside. There is much darkness of reference in the collection, but also a hopeful search for truthfulness and trust as the only things that matter. The poems - as poems of grace, control and beauty of image - demonstrate the power of the best poetry to speak of difficult things in a way that enlightens, not merely horrifies.
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PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233334 PB | 206 X 135MM | 72PP | 4 APRIL 2017
HAPPY ENDING NOT GUARANTEED Liam Hogan Liam Hogan’s collection of short stories is dark, fantastical and witty. This book is eerie, unsettling and frequently funny.
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ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909208360 PB | 199 X 129MM | 160PP | 6 APRIL 2017
THE ISLAND THAT'S HARD TO FIND IN ENGLISH Raymond Antrobus “His monologues are stunning studies of voice and substance, and his lyric poems are graceful and finely crafted.” Kwame Dawes The Island That’s Hard To Find In English is a collection by British Jamaican poet, Raymond Antrobus. After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him (Who I am now is something I need to remember). Raymond, upon returning to the UK travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.
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OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103872 PB | 10 APRIL 2017
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KINGDOM OF GRAVITY Nick Makoha
WATERFALL OF STARS Rosanne Alexander In 1976 Rosanne Alexander’s boyfriend Mike was offered the job of Warden of uninhabited Skomer island, giving them ten days to leave college, get married (a job condition) and move their belongings to their new home. This is Alexander’s account of the next ten years, spent in a place that became part of their lives. At its heart is their work as wardens, caring for important colonies of shearwaters, puffins and kittiwakes, and all the other wildlife on the Skomer. Waterfalls of Stars also covers their many trials on the island, from isolation and dwindling food during months of winter storms to witnessing the devastation of the island’s grey seal colony by an oil spill. Alexander writes lyrically about all these things. Her depiction of the natural habitat, the weather, storms and, in particular, the island’s seals is exceptional in its immediacy and physicality. The reader experiences all the delights and hardships of Skomer as though at first hand.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723807 PB | 208 X 135MM | 360PP | 10 APRIL 2017
#AFTERHOURS Inua Ellams In 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries’ archive collections, and through his own life’s story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18. In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams’ meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry’s great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.
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NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027164 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80PP | 14 APRIL 2017
THE EMMA PRESS ANTHOLOGY OF AUNTS Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright (ed.) Grown-ups but not authority figures, aunts play a crucial role in the upbringing of children across the world. This anthology puts these women in the spotlight and explores what it means to be – and feels like to have – an aunt, historically and today. Some aunts are biological, some are chosen, but all have an impact on the way we learn to move through the world. Poets in this volume tell stories of glamorous confidants, akin to older siblings, introducing their charges to new clothes and music, and of older women, tough and worldly-wise, who offer their nieces and nephews a different perspective on life. The contributors consider the role of aunts in large, close-knit families where sharing childcare is a welcome relief, and the thrill of a yearly visit from a fascinating near-stranger. Aunts appear as surprising, reassuring, role models and counter-examples. Above all, the book restores their centrality to young people’s development and to family life.
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THE EMMA PRESS | £10.00 | 9781910139660 PB | 184 X 123MM | 80PP | 14 APRIL 2017
Divided into two sections under the subtitles, Pitch and Lake, Andre Bagoo’s poems explore the multiple resonances of the words. The first part brings together poems that encompass reflections on art; Trinidad as a fallen Eden with its history of slavery and the inhumanity of “cachots brulants”; Black Lives Matter; visits to Britain and the image of cows “straight out of Hardy” and poems about finding love in a climate of homophobia. Poems with an elaborated discursive structure sit next to little imagist poems written in response to Trinidad’s disappearing fauna and threatened eco-system. The second part, Lake, is a sequence of prose poems that offer surfaces, like that of a lake, that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable.
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PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233532 PB | 206 X 135MM | 78PP | 24 APRIL 2017
THIS IS NOT A RESCUE Emily Blewitt In her debut collection Carmarthen-born Emily Blewitt writes beautifully considered poems about love and relationships (‘I Threw Myself at You’, ‘Navigation Points’), about living in modern Wales (‘How to Explain Hiraeth to an Englishman’), satirical pieces about office life (‘When I Think of Bald Men’), as well as more occasional poems (‘Devouring Jane’ – on Jane Austen’s heroes – and ‘Boba Fett and the Sarlacc’, a couple of cult characters plucked from Star Wars). There are two short sequences: one on a favourite cat, the other inspired by the ubiquitous crows in Wales. A wry, even slightly sardonic tone, contrasts with a lighter lyricism. The author also doesn’t shrink from several darker narratives involving sexual abuse and violence.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781724095 PB | 216 X 138MM | 64PP | 27 APRIL 2017
SELAH Keith Jarrett The Hebrew-derived word Selah appears as a musical interlude in the Psalms, often meaning ‘stop and consider’, and is used in other contexts, religious and secular. This collection brings together poems that combine musical intrigue with history and desire, from organ recitals (‘Resonances’ and ‘When the Roll is Called’) to teenage gospel hip-hop (‘Hip-hop Salvation’). Humour and sex punctuate social commentary (‘Gay Poem’ and ‘No Timewasters’) throughout. Above all, Selah asks the reader to stop and consider, pausing at the fault lines in relationships and intimacy (‘Making Light’) and transgression (‘Transfiguration’), asking difficult questions and holding them to the light.
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BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136960 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 30 APRIL 2017
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PITCH LAKE Andre Bagoo
MAY SOME KIND OF IMMORTALITY Tony Curtis Tony Curtis first published a story in 1970 and, alongside his award-winning poems, his stories have appeared regularly in magazines and anthologies, and been broadcast on the BBC. After five decades of writing, he has returned to the story form and this collection brings together earlier work, re-considered and edited, and new stories. Imbued with a sense of contemporary immediacy, the stories range over subjects as diverse as sperm donors, football betting, care for the elderly and email infiº–delity. Full of the energy, inventiveness and human sympathy that characterises his poetry, Curtis’s fiction explores the present moment, sensuous experience, public and private histories, grief and delight. He brings wit and an alert and intelligent sensibility to bear on every subject, making these short stories utterly engaging.
CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836668 PB | 216 X 138MM | 242PP | 1 MAY 2017
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Earth is no longer humanity’s only home. Slowly they have colonised the galaxy, spreading ever outwards into the darkest reaches of Terran space. To some Earth is now a myth, a fairy-tale; stories told to them by their grand parents when they were children. To others the Earth is still the place they call home: a bleak, inescapable fact that must be endured in order to survive. In this exciting collection of stories chronicling the turbulent events of humanity’s struggle for survival six hundred years in our future, some of today’s leading science fiction writers take us from the vast depths of uncharted space to the surface of a shockingly different planet Earth, where civilisation is desperately trying to preserve the last shreds of its human identity.
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SNOWBOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911390015 PB | 198 X 129MM | 1 MAY 2017
THE SONG WEIGHER: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EGILL SKALLAGRÍMSSON 10TH-CENTURY VIKING AND SKALD Ian Crockatt (trans.) Egill Skallagrímsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth-to-thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill’s saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means ‘bald’) and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Eríkr Blooðax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill’s poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve.
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ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781910345917 PB | 216 X 138MM | 128PP | 1 MAY 2017
COFFEE: A POEM l'Abbé Guillaume Massieu We do not often think nowadays of hot drinks as a subject for poetry, but the eighteenth century viewed things rather differently, with poems on an extraordinary range of topics – electricity, solar and lunar eclipses, scientific instruments, gardening, and, indeed, hot drinks. One of the most successful of these poems, at least in terms of its number of appearances in anthologies and in translation, was the Abbé Massieu’s poem Caffæum, Carmen (Coffee: A Poem), a relatively short ‘long poem’ written in Latin which was esteemed by contemporaries and able to attract readers for over a century after its author’s death. Latin verse continued to be a lively and successful cultural phenomenon well into the eighteenth century and this ingenious and entertaining poem not only tells us all about the origins and the real or alleged properties of coffee but even how to make a cup of coffee. John Gilmour’s witty translation in rhyming couplets perfectly captures the humour and playfulness of the original poem, and his introduction helps to locate both poem and author in their historic context.
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ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345795 PB | 216 X 138MM | 64PP | 1 MAY 2017
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FRONTIER WORLDS Scott Harrison (ed.)
THE WELSH AT PASSCHENDAELE Jonathan Hicks This work is a new interpretation of the First World War Battle of Passchendaele (the Third Battle of Ypres) which lasted from 31 July to 10 November 1917. The word ‘Passchendaele’ has become a byword for the death and suffering of the Great War. A remorseless slog by Allied soldiers up towards the village itself, through mud, rain, cold, and dead bodies, it was the most horrific of battles. By the time the fighting in this sector paused on 10 November 1917, hundreds of thousands of men on both sides had been killed or wounded. The landscape was scarred and desolate, and the men who fought there and survived would never forget the experience. This detailed work brings together the personal experiences, poignant stories, vivid accounts and photographs of soldiers who fought at the Third Battle of Ypres in the battalions of the Welsh regiments and their supporting detachments, as well as those men of Welsh origin who served in other regiments.
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Y'LOLFA | £12.99 | 9781784613747 PB | 215 X 140MM | 1 MAY 2017
GOD SAVE THE TEEN Andrew Graves God Save The Teen takes us through the side streets of modern Britain, finding love and loss within the fractured estates and beleaguered communities and pays homage to the likes of Johnny Cash, Alan Moore and Nottingham’s own Brian Clough in a slide tackling style of poetry, which is all the writers own. There is an honesty here, a heart on sleeve, soul searching rhythm which is never more apparent than in his acclaimed one person show, which sits at the centre of this brutal, sometimes funny, always emotional brand new collection. Partly hopeful, partly nostalgic it’s a gritty, chaotic andcurious rhetoric, perfectly in keeping with the post-Brexit, uneasy atmosphere of an increasingly out of control, faltering modernity.
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BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570028 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 MAY 2017
PERMEABLE Hannah Chutzpah “Fascinating ideas, expressed eloquently, amusingly and with supreme lyricism.” Sabotage Reviews Permeable is a warm, funny and nuanced collection from a dynamic and seasoned wordsmith. Covering everything from the difficulties of love to mental health and Tetris, Hannah Chutzpah paints powerful pictures about the instability and insecurity of ‘millennial’ life. Taking a winding route via hoarding, pet crematoriums and lunar photography, Permeable is a guide for trying to get by as best you can without being an arse.
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BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570035 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 MAY 2017
Everything Wrong with You is Beautiful is a celebration of the foul-ups, losses and ridiculousnesses encountered while attempting to live a worthwhile life. Tina Sederholm finds profundity in profanity, freedom through debt, wisdom in a cup of tea. She explodes the big things that don’t matter, seeks out the tiny secrets that do. She is equally seduced by both eight-foot gods and cupcakes via awkward sex talks and debt, the result is Radio 4 with the shackles off. Part cry for freedom, part recipe for survival, this is a collection that everyone can learn from.
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BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570011 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 MAY 2017
JAM IS FOR GIRLS OR (JAM IS FOR GIRLS, GIRLS GET JAM) Shagufta K Jam is for Girls is Shagufta K’s fiercely honest debut collection. Her work lays witness to the immigrant experience and gives voice to the women who made journeys into unknown lands through the eyes of their daughters. This is not a collection that struggles between two conflicting cultures, but is an unashamed and unapologetic confirmation of the third generation identity carving itself a space in an increasingly Islamaphobic world. She deftly balances passion and tenderness in her poems, exploring the personal and the political through gender inequality, racism and injustice that is present in the modern world.
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BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570004 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 MAY 2017
THE NIGHT VISITORS Jenn Ashworth & Richard V. Hirst Two women connected by the notorious Gosforth Massacre of 1917, a murder case famous among true-crime fans and internet sleuths, strike up an email conversation and begin an uneasy investigation into their mutual ancestor Hattie Soak, a silent film star who fled the scene of the crime. The Night Visitors explores ghosts, obsession and inherited evil. ln this novella, the technology that connects us becomes the conduit of un-expiated evil in a story told entirely via an exchange of emails.
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DEAD INK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780993401411 PB | 198 X 129MM | 1 MAY 2017
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EVERYTHING WRONG WITH YOU IS BEAUTIFUL Tina Sederholm
TELL NO-ONE ABOUT THIS Jacob Ross This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK. These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices – from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British – that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.
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PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £14.99 | 9781845233525 PB | 360PP | 1 MAY 2017
EVERY FOX IS A RABID FOX Harry Gallon Robert didn’t mean to kill his brother. But he did insist on driving to their uncle’s funeral. Consumed by guilt, Robert refuses to show emotion. And when the ghost of his stillborn sister suggests his father caused their uncle’s death, Robert recalls a childhood of resentment and abuse to try and make a truth he can live with. Every Fox is a Rabid Fox reflects issues of class, mental illness and how the unhappiness, depression and toxic-masculinity of older generations is passed down to their children.
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DEAD INK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911585060 PB | 1 MAY 2017
DARK LAND, DARK SKIES Martin Griffiths The classically named constellations and stars of the night sky haven’t always been the province of Greek and Roman gods. Ancient peoples around the world have looked up and added their particular myths to the heavens, only to have them subsumed by the Classics as the science of astronomy developed. Dark Land, Dark Skies looks behind the classical sky into past, oral traditions and the stories associated with the changing groups of stars. Martin Griffiths has written an engaging astronomical guide – for amateurs and professionals alike – with star charts and useful tips on recognition of stars and constellations. To that he adds the folk stories attached to each constellation, to produce a new and subversive exploration of the night sky above us all.
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SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723838 PB | 208 X 135MM | 220PP | 1 MAY 2017
Three hundred years ago, an acorn germinated at the edge of a field; today a mighty oak stands in the middle of a congested roundabout. What has it stood silent witness to over those hundreds of years? What changes have taken place around it? The stories of towns are so often told in terms of their architecture, or the humans that have occupied it. But the trees have been there, in many cases, much much longer. An oft neglected aspect of our urban landscape, their statuesque presence would be sorely missed if they were gone. This book brings trees to the fore, with evocative illustrations and beautifully told stories of the natural wonders of Reading.
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TWO RIVERS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781909747289 PB | 170 X 124MM | 84PP | 1 MAY 2017
THE HUMBLE FAMILY INTERVIEWS Nigel Hutchinson A post-war housing estate: a place where a grazed knee and the uncertainties of life in the round can share equal weight, where even the smallest drama can sometimes seem too much — the world of the Humble family, a life large; a life that’s not enough... The poetry in this debut collection reflects on the experiences of ordinary lives in the hinterlands, places neither in the thriving centres of cities nor the affluent suburbs, places unsure of their identity and status. Wry, sometimes tragic, these poignant and carefully observed pieces succeed in being as vivid as they are humane.
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CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911540007 PB | 216 X 140MM | 80PP | 1 MAY 2017
THE FERN HEDGE Jean Harrison It is Alice’s 80th birthday and she detests birthdays. The daughter of an Anglican rector, Alice has a lifelong and fierce commitment to rationality and mathematics. Eschewing Christianity after her Cambirdge degree and left disillusioned by an unremarkable working life, she went on to have a marriage that dissappointed her and a daughter who bored her. As Alice, her long suffering daughter Kate and her spoilt granddaughter Joanne prepare for the birthday party their cumulative history is remembered and tensions between them mount. Events come to a head when Jo brings another resident to her grandmother’s room to join the party, presenting them with an image of Alice’s possible future with Alzheimers. As the women face the enormity of the changes taking place in their lives, Kate has to decide whether to recognise how much she hates her mother and to forgive her whilst Jo has to come to terms with the next phase of growing up and Alice confronts a grim future.
FICTION
CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836712 PB | 216 X 138MM | 300PP | 1 MAY 2017
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THE SHADY SIDE OF TOWN: READING'S TREES Adrian Lawson and Geoff Sawers
STANLEY SPENCER POEMS: AN ANTHOLOGY Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder & Peter Robinson (ed.) Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) was undoubtedly one of the most admired and influential English painters of the twentieth century. The 2017 Cookham Festival’s Stanley Spencer Poetry Competition invited poets to find inspiration for their own art in the work of this remarkable man. Stanley Spencer: An Anthology of Poems publishes a selection from the entries to the competition chosen by its judges, Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder, and Peter Robinson. From this gathering, the shortlist of commended entries and the prize winners were then drawn. These carefully selected and sequenced poems are presented here in the company of images reflecting this painter’s extraordinary life and works.
POETRY
TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747272 PB | 210 X 135MM | 88PP | 1 MAY 2017
THE IMPOSSIBLE FAIRYTALE Han Yujoo The Impossible Fairytale tells the story of the nameless ‘Child’, who struggles to make a mark on the world, and her classmate Mia, whose spoiled life is everything the Child’s is not. At school, adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty, soul-crushing hierarchies and an underlying menace. Then, one day after hours, the Child sneaks into the classroom to add ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks, unlocking a series of events with cataclysmically horrible consequences. But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel...
FICTION
TILTED AXIS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911284093 PB | 198 X 127MM | 351PP | 5 MAY 2017
THE WOMEN OF VERSAILLES Kate Brown In Kate Brown’s skillful debut novel, the narrative slips between the decadent world of Versailles during the reign of Louis XV in 1745, and the day, just before the French revolution in 1789, that Versailles is stormed by the women of Paris and Louis XV1 is forced to move the court to the Tuileries. The Women of Versailles is the story of Adelaide, spirited tomboy daughter of Louis XV, and tells the story of her teenage upbringing in the extreme society of the Versailles court, at once licentious, excessive and bound by the dictates of society and fashion. A minor figure in history, Brown’s Adelaide is at sea in the court of her royal family and hangers on – including her father’s bourgeoise mistress Madame de Pompadour, whom Adelaide at first idolises as part of her political and sexual awakening, with dangerous results. But as Madame stalks the Palace corridors alone forty-four years later, under the looming shadow of the revolution, what has happened to the hopes of a young girl and the doomed regime in which she grew up?
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SEREN | £8.99 | 9781781723777 PB | 198 X 129MM | 288PP | 11 MAY 2017
Each day of 2015 Jan Carson wrote a short story on the back of a postcard and mailed it to a friend. Each of these tiny stories was inspired by an event, an overheard conversation, a piece of art or just a fleeting glance of something worth thinking about further. Collected in one volume, Carson’s postcards present a panoramic view of contemporary Belfast — its Ikeas, its coffee shops, its streets and museums and airports — and offer it to the wider world. Even as they seem to spring from a writer’s solitary perspective, taken together, these observations and their distribution speak of human connectedness. Like a pleasant surprise in the mail, this collection reminds us how many friendships are born and strengthened in a story shared.
FICTION
THE EMMA PRESS | £16.50 | 9781910139684 PB | 198 X 129MM | 64PP | 11 MAY 2017
FIRST FOX Leanne Radojkovich The stories in First Fox create an everyday world tinged with the dreamlike qualities of fairy tales. An old woman accidentally becomes a mother at 79, while a missing mother returns to her daughter as sunlight on a patch of grass. Leanne Radojkovich’s unsentimental style allows her to depict, with a dark surrealism, the strangeness that lurks at the fringes of suburban lawns. She explores the complex dynamics of families with a blend of dry wit and fugitive, startling imagery. In these stories, disappointments and consolations meet with fantastical moments that wind their way into the realm of possibility. These suburban fairy stories play into an appetite for contemporary reframings of the fantastical, represented by the likes of Angela Carter, Kate Atkinson and Marina Warner.
FICTION
THE EMMA PRESS | £6.50 | 9781910139707 PB | 198 X 129MM | 64PP | 16 MAY 2017
ALL MY MAD MOTHERS Jacqueline Saphra Jacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp. With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.
POETRY
NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027201 PB | 216 X 138MM | 72PP | 23 MAY 2017
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POSTCARD STORIES Jan Carson
WHITE PLAINS Gordon Lish “Listen to me. I want to tell you something. I am not a writer. I am a rewriter. Or a re-writer. I used to think I was a revisor. Or a reviser. But producing this book has shown me what the score was. Or is. You see? It’s sick. A sickness. Much as I try, I can’t leave it, or well enough, alone. Each time I rewrite, I say what’s been said a different way from how it had been said, which means that, each time I rewrite, I get, or the words get, farther and farther, or further and further, necessarily, ineluctably, from the truth. So that’s what the deal is. That’s how White Plains got itself written. And now, presto, into your hands. Falser and falser as I, or as the words, damn their eyes, went along.” Gordon Lish
LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £18.99 | 9780993505690 HB | 234 X 156MM | 256PP | 6 JUNE 2017
“Gordon Lish, famous for all the wrong reasons, has written some of the most fascinating American fiction of the last ten years.” Don Delillo
“Lish has produced a wealth of avant- garde prose, worthy of the pioneers of literary modernism.” David Winters, The Guardian
JUNE 56
The narrative arcs of love and loss, sex and death, with the constant interplay between time present and time past, unite this deeply a ective collection from widely published and award winning poet, Liz Fincham. Structured in three acts, Green Figs and Blue Jazz moves from a winter solstice, gathering memories of a relationship in which the signs of transience and mortality appear in retrospect, to a central act in which loss comes to the fore so that every place, each object, even the mud on a pair of boots becomes a stark meditation on what has gone, what might have been. Finally resolving in a final act in which memory, dreams and hope conspire to remake the past and give substance to possible futures, this evocative and imagistically rich collections moves full circle, ending in ‘advent’ with the world still waiting.
POETRY
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836675 PB | 216 X 140MM | 62PP | 1 JUNE 2017
LIFE OF THE DEAD: COLLECTED POEMS Hanoch Levin Hanoch Levin’s poetry stands alone as a single volume in his collected works, which run to fifteen volumes of drama and prose. Levin's poetic voice – mordant, witty, irreverent, erotic and highly satirical, yet also whimsical and delicate – is arresting, distinctive and unusual. This is poetry that cuts across national and ideological boundaries and stereotypes, yet speaks with a culturally-distinct voice directly, entertainingly, honestly and fearlessly to a culturally diverse English-language readership. When this volume was published in Israel, it proved to be enormously popular and went through three editions in its first year and has continued to be reprinted since. This bilingual edition makes his poetry available to an English-lanugage readership for the first time – to date Levin is only known in the UK as a playwright.
POETRY
ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781908376641 PB | 216 X 138MM | 144PP | 1 JUNE 2017
ERIC GILL & DAVID JONES AT CAPEL-Y-FFIN Jonathan Miles Eric Gill and David Jones at Capel-y-ffin is the story of controversial artist Eric Gill’s artistic and religious community in the Black Mountains of Wales during the 1920s, told through the character and work of Gill himself and David Jones, two of Britain’s most significant twentieth century artists. In it Jonathan Miles offers a commentary on the radical Catholicism of Gill and on the community’s Arts and Crafts-style focus on the handmade at its base in a former monastery. Capel-y-ffin’s remoteness offered Gill time to develop his religious thinking but also to experiment with his sexuality. For Jones it offered escape from his wartime experiences and a cultural homecoming which resulted in a productive period of painting and engraving. The personality and practice of both men was to be marked indelibly by their time there and in this new edition of his book Jonathan Miles, incorporates new images and new research into a page-turning and accessible narrative.
NONFICTION
SEREN | £12.99 | 9781781724019 PB | 208 X 135MM | 220PP | 1 JUNE 2017
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GREEN FIGS AND BLUE JAZZ Liz Fincham
REQUITE Malaika Kegode In her debut poetry collection Requite, Malaika Kegode’s lens is on people, the ones that speak to us through music and books, those both real and imagined, as she shines a light on loneliness and the sometimes unbearable burden of love and being loved. It is a love letter to the testament of humanity and the patchwork of people that make up our lives. Her gently crafted style is tender, astute and unfalteringly humane as she blends the mundane, everyday rituals of brewing tea and watching TV with the vast subjects of love, loss, growth and rebirth.
POETRY
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570042 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 1 JUNE 2017
AT HAJJ Amaan Hyder At Hajj is a stylish, accomplished debut by Amaan Hyder. In a collection that flickers between poetry and poetic prose, Hyder embarks on the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, capturing the colour and heat of Saudi Arabia in a bustling, charming book about family, faith and the weight of tradition.
POETRY
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058447 PB | 216 X 140MM | 1 JUNE 2017
POETS AND THE ALGERIAN WAR Francis Combes (ed.) The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) was one of the bloodiest post-1945 liberation struggles. Characterised by civilian massacres and the widespread use of torture, it led to the death and displacement of two million people. It was also the first major conflict since the Spanish Civil War to mobilize a generation of writers and artists to protest against the conduct of the war, most notably in Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In 1960 many of France’s leading writers and intellectuals – including Simon de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Pierre Boulez, François Truffaut and Marguerite Duras – signed Le Manifeste des 121, calling on the French government to renounce the use of torture in Algeria. Many writers found themselves on the front-line. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated by the OAS in 1962. They tried, unsuccessfully, to kill Madeleine Riffaud, who reported on the war for L’Humanité. There were two attempts on Sartre’s life. This anthology features both French and Algerian poets who opposed the war.
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SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780995563537 PB | 197 X 127MM | 272PP | 1 JUNE 2017
Without Passport or Apology is a book about emigration and immigration, racism and resistance, slavery and freedom. Drawing on thirty years of working as a film-maker in the Caribbean, Europe and Africa, Ishaq Imruh Bakari addresses head-on the experience of African-Caribbean migration, for himself and for the millions who constitute the African diaspora around the world. It’s a book about places – Haiti, Rwanda, South Africa, Zanzibar, Paris, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Tanzania. It’s a book about people – including Marcus Garvey, Aubrey Williams, Stuart Hall, Louis Farrakhan, Martin Carter, Shake Keane and Courtney Pine. Above all it’s an affirmation of the defiant spirit of the runaway African, the Maroon who moves through the world without passport or apology.
POETRY
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780995563544 PB | 197 X 127MM | 112PP | 1 JUNE 2017
INCENDIUM AMORIS Steve Ely Steve Ely’s new book takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris (‘The Fire of Love’) by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle, ‘the hermit of Hampole’. The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, scepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant’s revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalising capital, a guerilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia.
POETRY
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9780995563551 PB | 197 X 127MM | 124PP | 1 JUNE 2017
GUEST SJ Bradley Samhain is a young, angry and bewildered squatter living in an abandoned hotel in the North of England. One day he receives a message, his father – a man he never knew – was an undercover policeman infiltrating the Green movement of the 80s. What’s more, he finds out that he too is now a father. As Sam leaves for Europe, he pursues freedom and flees from his responsibilities. Responsibility, however, is hard to escape. Guest is a story of disillusionment, protest and, eventually, redemption.
FICTION
DEAD INK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911585053 PB | 1 JUNE 2017
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WITHOUT PASSPORT OR APOLOGY Imruh Bakari
IF I HAD THE WINGS Helen Klonaris To be gay and growing up in the small Greek-Bahamian community, which feels its traditional culture and religious pieties are under threat, is fraught with constraints and even danger. The main characters in Helen Klonaris’s poetic, inventive and sometimes transgressive collection of short stories confront this reality as part of their lives. Yet there are also ways in which young women in several of the stories search for roots in that tradition – to find within it, alternatives to the dominant in uence of the Orthodox church. These include attempts to make connections between their Caribbean lives and the figures and narratives drawn from Greek mythology. Klonaris focuses closely on family relationships, in particular the difficulty of father/daughter relationships – ranging from over-bearing authority, absence and incest. Klonaris’s characters are very much part of the wider changes in Bahamian society, including the presence of unregistered immigrants from Haiti, and the interplay between fear, repression, hypocrisy and resistance in the relations between the state, the churches and the LGBT community.
FICTION
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233464 PB | 206 X 135MM | 156PP | 1 JUNE 2017
BRAT Ghillian Potts On her twelfth birthday Brat’s father disappears. She waits, but he never comes back. When she goes looking she is laughed at, and her belongings stolen. Reduced to begging and determined to find out what has happened to him, she falls in with Gray and Baylock, whom she quickly discovers are outlaws, but there is far more to either of them than a falling out with the law, and Brat finds that nothing is simple, nowhere is safe, and being reunited with her family is going to be difficult, and something she may decide must wait as more pressing tasks fall into her path. This is the first young adult novel from the prolific children’s author.
FICTION
ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909208414 PB | 198 X 129MM | 176PP | 6 JUNE 2017
THE OLD WOMAN FROM FRUILI Ghillian Potts The Duke looks out from his castle, and everything he can see for miles and miles belongs to him. Everything, except one small strong house, with a small garden two goats and a beehive. They belong to the old woman from Friuli. The Duke wants that house, but the old woman, she won’t sell. She’s from Friuli, where all the really stubborn people come from. The latest children’s book by the popular children’s author Ghillian Potts, illustrated by Ed Boxall.
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ARACHNE PRESS | £6.99 | 9781909208407 PB | 210 X 148MM | 36PP | 6 JUNE 2017
A powerful novel about a woman who runs away from home, seeking to free herself from the shackles of society and familial attachments, and instead devote her attentions to writing a novel. When she realises that her five year old son Roo has followed her, Ishwari struggles with her identity as a mother and the responsibilities that brings, versus the guilty knowledge that she cannot want her own child when his existence requires her to suppress her own dreams. Ishwari and Roo wander the streets at night, looking for a place to stay, until an elderly caretaker takes pity on them and offers them an empty room on the terrace of a guest house. Ishwari gets work as a caregiver to the handsome gentleman who lives next door, while Roo, who is lame, spends all day locked up in the room on the roof. Pulsating with raw energy, Abandon gives voice to the perpetual conflict between life and art.
FICTION
TILTED AXIS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911284116 PB | 198 X 127MM | 6 JUNE 2017
EXTRAVAGANT STRANGER Daniel Roy Connelly In a style of speech without speech marks, rhythmically spanning the globe from his birth to imagined death, Daniel Roy Connelly’s Extravagant Stranger is a rare work of tightly structured, prosepoetry vignettes. Written in blocks of text firmly grounded in time and space, Connelly’s Bildungsroman encompasses six decades and three continents – traversing sickness, violence, international diplomacy, education, epiphany, fatherhood, Hollywood and academia. This unique collection of genre-defying work speaks with sharp humour about a life spent amassing more questions than answers and more absurdity than sagacity.
POETRY
LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £12.99 | 9780993505683 HB | 234 X 156MM | 64PP | 6 JUNE 2017
GETTING THE NOD Straight through a red light, clip a beedi seller on the kerb with my wing mirror, pull out way to soon onto Colaba Causeway, horns everywhere, indicate incorrectly then turn left instead of right at the Mahatma Gandhi fountain, stall on several technical points, examiner not happy. Nod backwards at a bottle of Black Label boxed and wrapped on the rear seat of the Escort, all smiles, told to drive expressly every day so as to improve, pink chitty, copied 7-fold, in my hand, congratulations, sir, you are legal on the roads of India.
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ABANDON Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay
COLD IRON - THE BOOK OF 21ST CENTURY GHOST STORIES Eileen Jones and Peter Mortimer (ed.) Seventeen tales, whittled down from a total of almost 200 submitted from writers both established and unknown, bring a selection both paying homage to the tradition of the ghost story and placing it firmly in the context of our own times. Thus, ghosts appear on football terraces, from cancer wards, on the floor of TV shows, on the late night service bus, over a Sunday dinner and at a supermarket checkout. Authors include Wendy Robertson, Kitty Fitzgerald and Beda Higgins plus a host of promising new writers. The book’s launch is midnight on Saturday June 10th at the imposing St George’s Church on Cullercoats seafront, as part of the IRON in the Soul Festival.
FICTION
IRON PRESS | £9.00 | 9780993124587 PB | 210 X 148MM | 84PP | 8 JUNE 2017
THE WATER THIEF AND THE MANATEE Kitty Fitzgerald Kitty Fitzgerald's new fable is a highly readable mix of a strong story and a political, ecological and cultural fable as a young girl and her father on a small island are confronted by the reality and cruelty of global market forces with the privatisation of their traditional water supply. Support comes from the natural world in the form of a manatee, a creature whom we learn is the girl’s mother. The book is illustrated in full colour by North East artist Nicola Balfour. Kitty Fitzgerald has written plays for stage and radio, plus screenplays, and has published four novels, including Pigtopia (Faber) which has been translated into 24 languages. IRON Press also published the author’s short story collection Miranda’s Shadow.
FICTION
IRON PRESS | £10.00 | 9780995457966 PB | 210 X 148MM | 80PP | 8 JUNE 2017
PISANKI Zosia Kuczynska In 1942, a young woman boards a train in Arkhangelsk, on the eastern border of Poland. Sixty years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.
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THE EMMA PRESS | £6.50 | 9781910139721 PB | 198 X 129MM | 36PP | 8 JUNE 2017
Padraig Regan’s poems delight in the sensual and the visual: this pamphlet is alive with the textures of paint, sweat, sugar and overripe fruit. Regan riffs on art history in a way which is playful and inquisitive, bringing together Johann Zo any and David Hockney for mojitos by a California pool. Other poems focus on the representation of the human body. They discover alternative histories in responses to paintings where the gaze of male artists is directed towards the male figure in queerly erotic ways. A pair of poems titled ‘Glory’ reads the iconography of Elizabeth I as a kind of drag act for the body politic, and the final sequence is a dazzling, near-Cubist display, shedding light on Caravaggio’s pictures of a young male model from a variety of revealing angles.
POETRY
THE EMMA PRESS | £5.00 | 9781910139745 PB | 178 X 110MM | 36PP | 8 JUNE 2017
WELSH VERSE Tony Conran The tradition of Welsh poetry stretches back to the sixth century, making it one of the oldest living literatures in Europe. In Welsh Verse Tony Conran translates a selection from fourteen centuries of poetry, from the epics of Taliesin and Aneurin to modern poets such as Gwyn Thomas and Nesta Wyn Jones. En route he takes in sagas and carols, hymn and strict metres, Romantics and Social Realists. Here are translations of Cyddelw, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Ann Gri ths, Pantycelyn, T Gwynn Jones, Williams Parry and Parry-Williams, Saunders Lewis, Gwenallt and Waldo Wlliams. The poetic movements of Welsh-language verse are charted in Conran’s in uential Introduction, in which he outlines the importance of poetry in Welsh society and how it has responded to Welsh history.
POETRY
SEREN | £12.99 | 9781781724040 PB | 208 X 135MM | 360PP | 12 JUNE 2017
BLACK SHIVER MOSS Graham Mort Graham Mort’s masterly 10th collection of poetry, Black Shiver Moss, is packed with poems about his native northern counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria, as well as stunning evocations of elsewhere: Africa, Southern Spain, France, Italy. A prize-winning short story author as well as a poet, Mort’s rich, concentrated style thrives on detailed observations of the natural world, their deep feeling harnessed to a finely-honed technique.
POETRY
SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723869 PB | 198 X 129MM | 72PP | 29 JUNE 2017
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WHO SEEMED TO BE ALIVE & ALTOGETHER REAL Padraig Regan
BANIPAL
THE MAGAZINE OF MODERN ARAB LITERATURE Banipal magazine showcases contemporary Arab authors in English translation, from wherever they are writing and publishing. An independent magazine, founded 19 years ago, in 1998, by Margaret Obank and Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, Banipal's three issues a year present both established and emerging Arab writers through poems, short stories or excerpts of novels, and features. The magazine features interviews with authors, publishers and translators, book reviews and photo-reports of literary events. From the first issue, the three cornerstones of Banipal were that Arab literature is an essential part of world culture and human civilisation; that dialogue between different cultures needs to be continually deepened; and that the joy and enlightenment to be gained from reading beautiful poetry and imaginative writing is an integral part of human existence. These three points have guided Banipal’s translation and promotion of contemporary Arab literature. Banipal is a magazine for lovers of literature, of world literature, to encourage a wider readership of Arab writers and poets for their own sake, and for both the particularity and the universality of their voices.
CURRENT ISSUE: 9780995636903 ÂŁ9.00
FOR INFORMATION ON SUBSCRIPTIONS AND STANDING ORDERS FOR BOOKSHOPS PLEASE CONTACT ENQUIRIES@INPRESSBOOKS.CO.UK.
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ACUMEN January, May & September
AGENDA April & September
BANIPAL March, June & November
BRITTLE STAR Two issues per year
ENVOI February, June & October
NAKED PUNCH One issue per year
THE NORTH Two issues per year
POETRY IRELAND February, June & October
UNDER THE RADAR
MAGAZINES
MAGAZINES
March, August & December
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LES FUGITIVES Dedicated to publishing innovative writing by francophone female authors previously unavailable in English or in the UK.
"A little gem (...) a powerful example of how summary, channeled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art." Harper's Magazine
SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN Nathalie Léger First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinéma vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook. How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.
LES FUGITIVES | £12.00 | 9780993009303 PB | 180 X 156MM | 123PP | 31 MARCH 2015
"Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything— biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front... In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of [Marguerite] Duras’s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of “Wanda” are entirely her own." The New Yorker
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"It takes both the novel and biography to new and interesting places.’" Eimear McBride, The Guardian
"Beautifully translated." Times Literary Supplement
The philosophy and aim of the Patrician Press is to encourage and promote writers of high-quality fiction and poetry. They are small, independent and courageous. They strongly believe that it is imperative to uphold and maintain the quality of contemporary literature in today’s challenging, competitive and ever-changing technological world. The list includes novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction. Some of the books have an Italian flavour.
STANCE Mark Brayley
KILLING HAPLESS ALLY Anna Vaught
DUFF Suzy Norman
Working within the constraint of the lipogram, Stance is a poetry collection completely constructed without the use of the letter i.
This is a black comedy in which Alison conceived in childhood an alter ego called ‘Hapless Ally’ to present a different, more palatable version of herself to her family and to the world beyond.
Recovering from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, Duff Boyd plans to win back his estranged wife, Nerys.
Moving beyond the personal pronoun to be more objective, this collection delves through characters and narratives, as well as taking, at times, an imperative stance.
PATRICIAN PRESS | £8.00 100PP | 9780993494598 30 SEPTEMBER 2016
Ominously, the alter ego began to develop autonomy. Alison deals with this helped by a varied catalogue of imaginary friends. The book is about serious matters: fear, confusion, dark days of depression and breakdowns. It carries a timely message to anyone pole-axed by depression or associated problems — or any reader interested in such things: you can, like Alison, survive and prevail. Ah, if you had to survive — would you kill for it? Now that is an interesting question.
He suggests a road trip. Their destination is Aberdeen, the city where they fell in love. As they rattle along from Wales to Scotland, Duff ’s romantic mission is challenged by the strange characters they encounter. There is also the curious reappearance of a battered white Citroën. Who is driving it and what do they want from Duff?
PATRICIAN PRESS | £9.00 32PP | 9780993238840 22 OCTOBER 2015
PATRICIAN PRESS | £10.00 276PP | 9780993238864 3 MARCH 2016
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NEW PUBLISHERS
PATRICIAN PRESS
DONTELLA DI PIETRANTONIO ITALIAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
Donatella was born and grew up in Arsita, a small village in the province of Teramo, and now lives in Penne where she practises as a paediatric dentist. From the age of nine she has been writing stories, fables, poems, and now novels. My Mother is a River was her first novel. It was first published in Italy in 2011, where it won the Tropea and the John Fante literary prizes , and was translated into German in 2013. Her second book, Bella Mia won the Brancati Prize and was shortlisted for the prestigious Strega Prize.
MY MOTHER IS A RIVER Donatella Di Pietrantonio The sensitive and powerful story of the love between a mother and her daughter, a love “gone wrong from the start”. When Esperia exhibits the symptoms of a disease that robs her of her memory and the very sense of her existence, it is time for the daughter to take care of her and help her to rebuild her disintegrating identity. So the daily recounting of the past begins. Day after day we learn about the characters of the extended family, the inhabitants of the small village still without running water or electricity, in a “bright and harsh” Abruzzo, which emerges from the pages like a mythological distant land. They are bittersweet memories, full of life and truth, that rebuild the story of a relationship and of an Italy that appears so very distant and yet it is still present in our characters’ history. And, in the telling, the mother and daughter relationship slowly changes, fluctuating between love and hate, nostalgia and denial. A surprising new novel, revealing a strong voice weaving a compelling magic spell.
CALISI PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993238000 PB | 216 X 138MM | 176PP | 4 NOVEMBER 2015
BELLA MIA Donatella Di Pietrantonio A moving and unsentimental story of inner reconstruction after a devastating loss. Shortlisted for the prestigious Premio Strega in Italy in 2014, this is the story of a broken family coming to terms, in the aftermath of the earthquake in L’Aquila in 2009, with the loss of one of them - a twin sister, a daughter, a mother - while living in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city. The terse and clean voice of the spiky, single, thirty-something female narrator wards off sentimentality while guiding us through the inner reconstruction undertaken by each character individually and by the family as a whole, letting us witness the extraordinary poetic power of love and the renewal of hope.
CALISI PRESS | £12.00 | 9780993238024 PB | 216 X 135MM | 194PP | 23 NOVEMBER 2015
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IRON PRESS UNEARTH A NORTHUMBRIAN CLASSIC Originally published in June 1999, IRON Press are proud to present this reissue of a classic work of North East poetry. Fred Reed is probably one of the country’s most important dialect poets of recent times, in an area where the dialect is one of the most distinctive and unpolluted in the UK. The Northumbrian Language Society has been highly active in preserving and nurturing its native tongue and the respect in which this particular poet is held can be gauged from the society’s hosting of the annual Fred Reed Supper which always draws a big attendance. For various reasons it has been impossible to reissue this book before now, but with new technology, plus the active support of the society, they are delighted to bring it back into print, a large impressive collection of verse with its own extensive Northumbrian glossary!
THE NORTHUBORMAN Fred Reed Fred Reed was the foremost Northumbrian dialect poet of the 20th century. He died ion 1985 leaving a rich legacy of his native Northumbrian verse. Since his death his reputation has grown considerably and he’s been called ’the English Burns’ and his work has been compared to that of Hugh McDiarmid. This IRON Press collection, first published in 1999 has been out of print for some time but is now republished due to popular demand and is in conjunction with the Nothumbrian Language Society which champions Fred Reed’s work. In his foreword, Melvyn Bragg writes, "He is a poet whose words speak around from the page... he would all but sing his poems and even those without a smattering of the North Eastern tongue can find a tune here."
IRON PRESS | £8.00 | 9780906228715 PB | 210 X 148MM | 84PP | 8 JUNE 2017
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
FROM THE ARCHIVES
INDEX Adès, Timothy 11 Alexander, Rosanne 46 Alland, Sandra 44 Alma, Deborah 7 Antrobus, Raymond 45 Ashton, Gail 21 Ashworth, Jenn 51 Atkin, Polly 26 Austin, Jane 31 Bagoo, Andre 47 Bakari, Imruh 59 Bandyopadhyay, Sangeeta 9, 61 Banga, Bolvinder 42 Barokka, Khairani 44 Batten, David 22 Bean, Victoria 21 Berger, John 6 Bestwick, Simon 20 Black, D. M. 12 Blewitt, Emily 47 Boddy, Catharine 4 Boland, Eavan 28 Bradley, SJ 59 Brayley, Mark 67 Brown, Kate 54 Burke, Helen 24 Calder, Alison 11 Campbell, Siobhán 26 Carr, Alison 11 Carson, Jan 55 Charley, Nancy 17 Charlton, Ann 19 Chutzpah, Hannah 50 Cleary, Sophie 18 Combes, Francis 58 Connelly, Daniel Roy 61 Conran, Tony 63 Coupland, Krishan 18 Cowdhury, Anjana 31 Craig, Adam 23, 32, 42 Crockatt, Ian 49 Curtis, Tony 48 Dastidar, Rishi 37 Davoyan, Razmik 39 Debney, Patricia 32
Di Pietrantonio, Donatella 68 Dicks, Kevin 31 Dorcey, Mary 13 Draycott, Jane 54 Duffy, Carol Ann 29 Ellams, Inua 46 Ellwood, Nuala 29 Ely, Steve 59 Fincham, Liz 57 Fitzgerald, Kitty 62 Fortune, Jan 32 Fortune, Jan 32 Gallon, Harry 52 Gaydos, Katie 18 Gethin, Rebecca 22 Gluzman, Yelena 18 Goss, Rebecca 29 Graves, Andrew 50 Graves, Robert 8 Green, Jonathan 5 Griffiths, Martin 52 Haertmann, Sadakicki 3 Harmon, Maurice 14 Harris, Maggie 25 Harrison, Jean 53 Harrison, Scott 49 Hart, Jenn 39 Heaney, Marie 8 Hicks, Jonathan 50 Hirano, Keiichiro 27 Hirst, Richard V. 51 Hogan, Liam 45 Honychurch, Lennox 43 Hopesmith, Sophie 41 Howard, Joy 26 Hughes, Emma-Jane 40 Hutchinson, Nigel 32, 53 Hyder, Amaan 58 Ikezawa, Natsuki 27 Inglese, Andrea 37 Jacqmin, Hilary S. 36 Jarrett, Keith 47 Jess-Crooke, Carolyn 29 Johnson, Anna 16 Jones, Eileen 62
Jones, Graham 19 Jones, Nick 22 Jones, Vivian 30 K, Shagufta 51 Kegode, Malaika 58 Kendall, Judy 32 Kennard, Luke 2 Kirstein, Donna 32, 41 Kittle-Pey, Emma 28 Klonaris, Helen 60 Knight, Rowena 4 Kubo, Misumi 27 Kuczyńska, Zosia 62 Kwek, Theophilus 14 Laker, Gillian 22 Lambert, Richard 30 Lawson, Adrian 53 Leder, Carolyn 54 Lee, John Robert 44 Lee-Houghton, Melissa 9 Légerm Nathalie 66 Levin, Hanoch 57 Lish, Gordon 56 Little, Pippa 18 Littlepage Smith, Dana 22 Llasera, Isabelle 42 Lloyd Smith, Ashley 32 Lock, Fran 24 Longstaff, Marilyn 21 Lovell, Jane 32 Lyden, Thomas 12 Magrs, Paul 40 Makola, Nick 45 Marshall, Pete 32 Mason, Freddie 3 Massieu, l'Abbé Guillaume 49 Matsuda, Aoko 27 McCallum, Shara 16 McGarry, Jamie 4 McGowan, Jennifer A 25 McNish, Hollie 29 Miles, Jonathan 57 Monson, Jane 32 Moore, Merril 3 Morgan, Gerald 19 Morrison, Alan 43 Morrissey, Sinead 29 Mort, Graham 63 Mortimer, Peter 62
Mullineaux, Pete 14 Myers, Benjamin 9 Nicholls, Jack 36 Noll, Bink 3 Noond, Jez 32, 42 Norman, Suzy 67 O'Brien, Jean 13 O'Brien, Kerrie 13 O'Connell, Eugene 20 Olds, Sharon 29 Ono, Magatsugu 27 Pennant, Richard Douglas 41 Perman, David 15 Piercey, Rachel 25, 46 Pimlott, Kathy 7 Plomer, William 3 Potts, Ghillian 60 Radojkovich, Leanne 55 Ragg, Edward 33 Ralphs, Camille 7 Reed, Fred 69 Regan, Padraig 63 Renkichi, Hirato 34 Ridge, Lola 3, 33 Robinson, Peter 54 Robson, Jeremy 42 Ross, Jacob 52 Ross, Leone 36 Sabbagh, Omar 23, 42 Sam-La Rose, Jacob 43 Saphra, Jacqueline 55 Savile, Steven 20, 33, 44 Sawers, Geoff 53 Scott, Lawrence 38 Sederholm, Tina 51 Seed, Andy 8 Senior, Olive 23 Silva, Hannah 25 Simon, Emma 37 Skallagrímsson, Egill 49 Sluman, Daniel 44 Spring, Ian 24 Stryker, Joanne 32 Summers, Paul 42 Tantony, Rebecca 40 Tawada, Yoko 27 Taylor, CL 29 Tobin, Daniel 33 Toombs, Jeremy 30
Torre, Mónica de la 34 Turnbull, Giles L 22 Utting, Susan 34 Vaught, Anna 67 Veasey, Richard 32 von Törne, Volker 39 Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth 15 Watkinson, Sarah 22 Wigmore, Bryan 15 Williams, David Mark 32 Wilsea, Sue 4 Wright, Emma 46 Wright, Luke 10 Wyeth, Adam 12 Wynn Owen, Andrew 16 Yamazaki, Nao-Cola 27 Yoon, Prabda 35 Yoshida, Kyoko 27 Yujoo, Han 54
HANDSPEAK for the poet Luljeta Lleshanaku The deaf woman makes houses with her hands. Meaning is real, she says, look, it hangs in the air and holds it shape. Each word depends for its life upon its brother and sister. Today I thought of you in the same breath. For you, too, words are hard-won. They taste of metal-plated rain, of loneliness, of smoke. Stubborn, they refuse to yield. Monumental, womanly, They embed themselves in my body. Taken from Twist by Pippa Little, from Arc Publications, See page 18 for more information.
COVER IMAGE BY SORAYA GILANNI VILJOEN, ART DIRECTOR AT TILTED AXIS PRESS. SORAYAGILANNIVILJOEN@GMAIL.COM
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